Pace Expands Its Photography Program, Brooklyn’s Koenig & Clinton Gallery Closes, and More
Pace is merging with Pace/MacGill Gallery. The move will both streamline operations and strengthen its photography program. Since its founding in 1983 by Peter MacGill and partners Arne Glimcher of Pace and Richard Solomon of Pace Prints and Pace African & Oceanic Art, Pace/MacGill has held more than 350 exhibitions and has represented artists such as Richard Avedon, Richard Learoyd, Irving Penn, and Judith Joy Ross. The department will now be helmed by Lauren Panzo, formerly vice president at Pace/MacGill.
Through the merger, Pace will add five new artists to its roster: Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, David Goldblatt, Peter Hujar, and Richard Misrach. The gallery will stage two monographic photography exhibitions this year, a presentation of two bodies of work by Paul Graham in New York next month, and an exhibition of photographs by Irving Penn at Pace’s outpost in Geneva in March.
“The expansion of our capabilities in photography is an incredibly exciting development for Pace,” said gallery president and CEO Marc Glimcher. “Peter MacGill defined the ultimate gold standard as the preeminent photography gallery in the US. For almost forty years, he has never ceased to be a leading force. We are honored to continue this legacy with his remarkable people and the culture of expertise that Peter created.”
Pace also announced its representation of American painter Torkwase Dyson. The artist, who recently won the Studio Museum in Harlem’s $50,000 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize, also works with Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago. Dyson’s first collaboration with Pace was for I Can Drink the Distance: Plantationocene in 2 Acts in November 2019. The gallery commissioned the performance, which featured Gaika, Arthur Jafa, and Christina Sharpe, among others, for the inaugural season of Pace Live, its multidisciplinary program curated by Mark Beasley.
Commenting on her decision to join the gallery, Dyson said: “I’m interested in the politics of abstraction and I want to make paintings that emanate both a sense of poetry and agency. Painting is a methodology for which to think through everything that is not painting, and I can do just that at Pace. There are new beginnings to forge in my practice and I’m excited to be a part of such an elastic and prolific space to grow it all.”
Koenig & Clinton Gallery, which was founded in Chelsea in 2013 and moved to the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn in 2017, has closed its doors. Its final exhibition was “Tony Marsh: True North,” which ran from October 25 to December 21, 2019. Founders Leo Koenig and Margaret Liu Clinton announced the news in an email on Tuesday, January 21, which said that they decided to “pursue independent endeavors” but “remain grateful to the many: artists, collaborators, colleagues, critics, and patrons that enriched the gallery’s mission of organizing museum-quality exhibitions that were made accessible to so many publics.”
Claire Oliver Gallery opened an outpost in a four-story brownstone in central Harlem on January 18. Inaugurating the space is an exhibition of artworks by Judith Schaechter, “Almost Better Angels,” which is on view through February 22. The show features seven new large-scale stained-glass works mounted on light boxes and will mark her seventh solo exhibition with the gallery.
“I’m thrilled to open our new space in Harlem with ‘Almost Better Angels’ as we opened our Chelsea location almost twenty years ago with works by Judith Schaechter,” Claire Oliver said in a statement. “This exhibition marks a crossroads for the gallery: we are squarely looking to the future in our new space, while highlighting one of our seminal artists’ work that is both groundbreaking in form and subject and historically significant in its craft.”
Miles McEnery Gallery announced its representation of Pia Fries. The Swiss-born painter initially trained in sculpture then attended the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany, where she studied under Gerhard Richter from 1980 to 1986. “Like Gerhard Richter, whose squeegee effects she sometimes echoes, Fries seems . . . to denaturalize painting: Her abstract marks look most like gestural expressionism, but are too deliberately posed, too carefully built up, to act as spontaneous signs of a psychic state,” wrote David Frankel in a review of her work that appeared in the April 2007 issue of Artforum.
Fries’s recent solo exhibitions include “corpus transludi” at Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich; “parsen und module” at the Paris Museum of Modern Art, Paris; and “Pia Fries: vier winde” at the Lindenau Museum in Altenburg, Germany. Her work can also be found in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Detroit Institute of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany; Kunsthaus Zürich; and the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany.
Artists Dana James and John Knuth have joined Hollis Taggart. Born in 1986 and based in New York, James, the founder of Elgin Gallery, creates abstract works that feature figural elements inspired by suburban landscapes and the images associated with Americana. Her paintings have been featured in exhibitions at the Lodge Gallery (New York), Urban Gallery (Philadelphia), and Union Gallery (New York), among others.
Born in 1978 and based in Los Angeles, Knuth recently presented his abstract paintings at Hollis Taggart in “The Origins of the New World.” The artist is known for his exploration and manipulation of unconventional materials in series such as his fly paintings, for which Knuth feeds a mixture of sugar and watercolor paint to hundreds of thousands of houseflies, which then regurgitate onto the canvas, creating a sea of colored specks. He has recently had solo exhibitions at the NewStudio Gallery in Minneapolis and Marie Kirkegaard Gallery in Copenhagen.
“Dana’s vividly colored and perspective-bending compositions speak to the ongoing evolutions within abstraction as well as to the dynamism of painting practice today,” said Paul Efstathiou, the gallery’s director of contemporary art. “Equally, John’s unique, sometimes unorthodox, approach to painting as well as to installation and object-making captures the imagination and inspires a rethinking of what art is and how it should be made. We look forward to further engaging our audiences with their work.”
