Louise Nevelson: ShadowDance
Louise Nevelson: Shadow Dance 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 January 17 – March 1, 2025 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
New York – Celebrating its 62-year history with Louise Nevelson, Pace is pleased to present Louise Nevelson: Shadow Dance, a major exhibition of Nevelson’s late works, curated by gallery founder Arne Glimcher, at its 540 West 25th Street location in New York. The exhibition opened on January and will be on view until March 1, 2025, this show will place Nevelson’s iconic monochromatic sculptures in black and white in dialogue with her collages—including several rarely seen and never previously exhibited masterworks—made in the 1970s and 1980s.
Like Mondrian’s, Nevelson’s compositions are based on a strict adherence to vertical and horizontal regularity. During the 1970s and 1980s, there was a significant development: Nevelson incorporated the diagonal into her vocabulary. A new, angular energy surfaced in many of the works she produced during this period, breaking the rules by which she traditionally composed her work.
Louise Nevelson, Study for the Chapel of the Good Shepherd, c. 1975 SCULPTURE wood painted white 90-1/2" × 36" × 24" (229.9 cm × 91.4 cm × 61 cm) overall 48-1/4" × 7-1/4" × 13" (122.6 cm × 18.4 cm × 33 cm), hanging element 90-1/2" × 11" × 13" (229.9 cm × 27.9 cm × 33 cm), column © Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
These late works shed new light on her evolving aesthetic, bringing into focus a series of remarkably productive years of her practice in which she experimented with a new vocabulary of robust, muscular, and often minimal forms while staying true to her lifelong investigations of materiality, shape, and shadow.
Rooted in the legacies of Cubism and Constructivism, Nevelson’s artworks were widely celebrated during her lifetime for incorporating unexpected combinations of materials and forms. As part of her distinctive approach to abstraction, the artist often explored the myriad possibilities of collage—a technique she transposed into sculpture by means of compartmentalized elements and forms liberated from everyday meaning. Nevelson’s use of the collage aesthetic was formalist. Her art of scavenging and her affinity for the materiality of wood are linked to her personal life and her remarkable story.
Louise Nevelson, Dawn's Light, c.1975 SCULPTURE wood painted white 106" × 63" × 55" (269.2 cm × 160 cm × 139.7 cm)© Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Since Nevelson’s death there has been a series of radical re-appraisals of her work, especially as new frameworks and dialogues in art history have emerged in recent years. The gallery’s upcoming presentation in New York coincides with a global upswell of interest in her work, which is underscored by a forthcoming retrospective of the artist organized by the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, opening to the public in fall 2025. This past year, Nevelson was honored in memoriam at the Art Students League’s annual gala in New York—the artist was an alumna of the institution—and in 2022, a sprawling exhibition of her work, Louise Nevelson: Persistence—curated by Julia Bryan- Wilson, Columbia University professor and author of Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face (Yale University Press, 2023)—was presented as an official collateral event of the 59th Venice Biennale, and her work was also included in the main exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani.
Louise Nevelson, Artillery Landscape, c. 1985 SCULPTURE wood painted black 57" × 152" × 107" (144.8 cm × 386.1 cm × 271.8 cm)© Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Pace presented its first solo show of work by Nevelson in 1961 in Boston, and it has represented the artist—with whom the gallery’s Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher maintained a decades-long friendship—since 1963. Early in their relationship, Nevelson took the young Glimcher under her wing, introducing him to all of the most important Abstract Expressionist artists and bringing him into the fold of the New York art world. Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, Glimcher helped Nevelson achieve a new level of international recognition, supporting her in the production of numerous large-scale public commissions around the United States and the world. Opening at the beginning of Pace’s 65th anniversary year, this forthcoming Nevelson exhibition reflects the artist’s enduring and deeply personal relationship with Glimcher, and her indelible place in the gallery's history and its ethos today.
Louise Nevelson: Shadow Dance 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 January 17 – March 1, 2025 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
Louise Nevelson: Shadow Dance will showcase two of Nevelson’s rare white-painted wood sculptures—Study for the Chapel of the Good Shepherd and the never-before-exhibited Dawn’s Light, both created circa 1975—among her signature black-painted wood sculptures, including the large-scale freestanding composition Cascade- Perpendiculars XXX (1980–1982). Nevelson specifically spoke about the relationship of her black and white works to the perceptual thresholds of dawn and dusk, the liminal, transitional, and indiscernible moments between day and night. Harkening back to her famed large-scale, all-white sculptural installation Dawn’s Wedding Feast (1959)— which was presented at the Museum of Modern Art as a single installation before being split into separate parts— Dawn’s Light speaks to the ways that Nevelson’s later expressions were guided by the project of transformation and transfiguration that energized her practice for more than four decades.
Louise Nevelson, Cascade-Perpendiculars XXX, 1980-1982 SCULPTURE wood painted black 94-1/2" × 38-1/2" × 21-1/2" (240 cm × 97.8 cm × 54.6 cm) © Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The gallery’s presentation will also feature Artillery Landscape (ca.1985), a single sculpture consisting of a group of individual floor-based elements, which was exhibited for the first time as part of Louise Nevelson. Persistence in Venice in 2022. Never before seen in the United States, this sculptural installation comprises reclaimed wooden artillery boxes found, reconstructed, and painted black by Nevelson in the last few years of her life. The hinged box- like elements of Artillery Landscape refer back to Nevelson’s psychologically charged Dream House series of the early 1970s, yet the title of the work derives from the origin of the boxes themselves, scavenged and repurposed artillery containers for artillery. Of her interest in reclaimed materials, she once said, “I wanted to show that wood picked up on the street can turn to gold.”
Louise Nevelson: Shadow Dance 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 January 17 – March 1, 2025 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
Highlights in the exhibition include three wall-mounted works from the Mirror Shadows series of magisterial wall reliefs, one of the last bodies of work that Nevelson produced and among her most innovative. Alongside these important late sculptures, a selection of Nevelson’s collages attest to her intensely personal and private mode of expression, which she kept mostly secret during her lifetime. In the economy of Nevelson’s studio, the collage works emerged simultaneously with her monochromatic sculptures as extensions of the same creative gesture. Providing a new avenue for explorations of color, light, shadow, reflection, and line, these works incorporate combinations of metallic foil, cardboard, sandpaper, tape, wood, spray paint, printed paper, and newspaper. Tearing and re- combining traces of the past to produce a raw, unfiltered beauty, Nevelson developed an aesthetic of fragmentation and reassembly in her collages that animated the spirit of all her work.
Portrait of Louise Nevelson: © The Estate of Pedro E. Guerrero
Louise Nevelson (b. 1899, Kiev; d. 1988, New York), a leading sculptor of the 20th century, pioneered site-specific and installation art. She is best known for her monumental sculptures composed of discarded furniture and wooden elements found near her New York City studio. Nevelson arranged these elements into nested, box-like structures, she would then paint them in monochromatic black, white, or gold—transforming disparate elements into a unified structure. She also experimented with bronze, terracotta, and Plexiglas, eventually moving into the realm of collage, works on paper, and public art. With her compositions, Nevelson explored the relational possibilities of sculpture, summing up the objectification of the external world into a personal landscape. Although her practice is situated in lineage with Cubism and Constructivism, her sense of space and interest in the transcendence of the object reveal an affinity with Abstract Expressionism.
Nevelson has been the subject of over 70 one-artist exhibitions, including over ten traveling exhibitions, held at institutions worldwide including The Jewish Museum, New York (1965, 2007); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1967, 1970, 1980, 1987, 1998, 2018); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1973, 2017); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1986); and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1997). Recent exhibitions include Louise Nevelson In L.A.: Tamarind Workshop Lithographs From the 1960s, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2015); Reflections: Louise Nevelson, 1967, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts (2017); The Fourth Dimension, San José Museum of Art, California (2017); The Face in the Moon, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2018); Louise Nevelson, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019–2020); Louise Nevelson: Sculptor of Shadows / Skyggernes Skulptør, Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg, Denmark (2020–2021); Louise Nevelson: Dawn to Dusk, Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine (2023–2024); and The World Outside: Louise Nevelson at Midcentury, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas (2023–2024). Nevelson’s work is held in over 140 public collections worldwide including The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; The Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Tate, London, among many others.
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.
Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.
Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.
The exhibition opened on January 17th and will be on view until March 1, 2025, at Pace Gallery 510 West 25th Street in New York. For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too.
