SONIA DELAUNAY

Taking its title from a quotation by Delaunay, Pace’s presentation in Tokyo will feature a selection of her works on paper—created between 1923 and 1934—which served as studies for her commercial fabric designs. Organized in collaboration with Gió Marconi Gallery, this exhibition will showcase the artist’s visionary approach to color, pattern, and abstraction in relation to Japan’s unique aesthetic history.

Born in the Ukrainian village of Gradizhsk in 1885, Delaunay’s parents sent her to live with her uncle in St. Petersburg when she was seven years old. She studied in Germany as a teenager and subsequently moved to Paris, where she presented her first solo exhibition in 1908, married fellow artist Robert Delaunay in 1910, and would live and work for most of her life. The pair developed what they termed “simultanéisme,” or “simultanism,” —soon after called Orphism—a non-representation mode of making art that centered on chromatic relationships and contrasts. Embracing this philosophy in her work until her death in 1979, Delaunay charted new courses for the avant-garde with her lyrical, madcap paintings and textile designs.“We had rediscovered the moving principle of any work of art: the light, the movement of color,” she once said.

Pace’s presentation of some 40 works on paper by Delaunay will offer a window into the artist’s experimentations with form and material on an intimate scale. Depicting flowers, grids, starbursts, and otherworldly abstractions, these works— many of which are displayed in custom frames built by the gallerist Giorgio Marconi, who championed many artists, including Delaunay, during his lifetime—reflect the exploratory spirit that animated her practice for more than six decades.

Delaunay’s work is on view in the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s Woven Histories exhibition through September 13. She was also included in the Guggenheim Museum in New York’s recent exhibition Harmony and Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930, and last year she was the subject of Sonia Delaunay: Living Art at the city’s Bard Graduate Center Gallery.

Pace’s exhibition of Delaunay’s work will run concurrently with a presentation by Leo Villareal at its Tokyo gallery, drawing connections between both artists’ use of abstraction to explore perception, pattern, rhythm, and illusionistic optical effects.