Torkwase Dyson: Here
Torkwase Dyson: Here 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019 September 14 – October 26, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
Los Angeles – Pace is pleased to present Here, an exhibition of new paintings by Torkwase Dyson at its Los Angeles gallery, as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide Participating Gallery Program. The exhibition opened on September 14 and will be on view until October 26; the show will further explore ideas about the environment, architecture, infrastructure, and black space that are central to the artist’s practice.
In her work across painting, sculpture, performance, film, and drawing, Dyson uncovers continuities between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture through a language of abstract, poetic forms. Her two- and three- dimensional abstractions grapple with the ways in which space is perceived, imagined, and negotiated—particularly by black and brown bodies—to examine histories of human geography and black spatial liberation strategies.
Torkwase Dyson, Ossuaries 3 (Bird and Lava), 2024 PAINTING acrylic and graphite on canvas 14" × 11" × 1-1/4" (35.6 cm × 27.9 cm × 3.2 cm), 3 panels, each 14" × 48" × 1-1/4" (35.6 cm × 121.9 cm × 3.2 cm), overall, © Torkwase Dyson, courtesy Pace Gallery
The new works that Dyson is debuting in her presentation at Pace in LA represent the fundamental parts of a large- scale assemblage in memory of black underwater towns. Practicing mindful improvisation in her making process, the artist has imbued these paintings with forms that speak to the beauty and hauntology of black abstraction in motion, or what she calls “black compositional thought.”
This upcoming exhibition in LA is a continuation of Dyson’s ongoing Bird and Lava series, which she began making in 2020 and first exhibited at Pace’s East Hampton gallery that year. With the paintings and drawings in this body of work, the artist poses a multifaceted expression of a question: “If blackness is already an architectonic developed out of liquidity (ocean), can the work embody this phenomenon and offer sensation (sensoria) at the register of liberation?”
Torkwase Dyson: Here 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019 September 14 – October 26, 2024 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery
Having created a compositional system of curvilinear and rectilinear shapes to apply across all her Bird and Lava works, Dyson articulates histories of enslavement, displacement, and resistance through the phenomenological presence of geometric abstraction, dimensionality, and gesture. For her latest paintings in this series—which are the focus of her show at Pace in LA—Dyson has experimented with new material elements. In the artist’s view, the varied textures and geometries that appear throughout this series are thresholds, or portals, through which we might forge new spatial strategies of liberation. Holistically, Dyson’s installation for Here—attuned to enactments of precarity, liminality, and augmentation—invites contemplation and meditation.
Torkwase Dyson, Ocular Brutality (Bird and Lava), 2023-2024 PAINTING graphite and string on wood 21" × 16" × 4-3/16" (53.3 cm × 40.6 cm × 10.7 cm) © Torkwase Dyson, courtesy Pace Gallery
Ahead of her exhibition at Pace in LA, the artist is presenting a large-scale sculpture in the 2024 Whitney Biennial in New York through August 11. The Whitney’s inaugural Hyundai Terrace Commission for site-specific projects, Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground) (2024) is installed outdoors on the museum’s fifth floor. The architecturally scaled geometries in the sculpture—which responds to the light conditions on the terrace over the course of the day and night—invite tactile engagement and activation from viewers. Exhibited within view of the Hudson River, this work also speaks to the interconnected ecological and social histories of New York City.
Torkwase Dyson (b. 1973, Chicago, Illinois) describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Examining the history and future of black spatial liberation strategies, Dyson’s abstract works grapple with the ways in which space is perceived and negotiated, particularly by black and brown bodies. The artist’s work was presented at the Liverpool Biennial, United Kingdom (2023); 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, Seoul Museum of Art (2023); and the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021). Dyson's Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground) is currently on view as part of Whitney Biennial, New York (2024).
Dyson has participated in group exhibitions at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus (2021); The Mississippi Museum of Art, Mississippi (2022), which traveled to the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland (2022–2023); Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2022); St. Louis Place Park and Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Missouri (2023); Desert X, Coachella Valley, California (2023); and The National Academy of Design, New York (2024). Dyson has held solo exhibitions and installations at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine (2018); Graham Foundation, Chicago (2018); Schuylkill Center's Environmental Art, Philadelphia (2018); Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery, Bennington College, Vermont (2018); Serpentine Pavilion, Serpentine Galleries, London (2021); Hall Art Foundation, Schloss Derneburg, Germany (2021); and Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2023).
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential artists and estates of the 20th and 21st centuries, founded by Arne Glimcher in 1960. Holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko, Pace has a unique history that can be traced to its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery continues to nurture its longstanding relationships with its legacy artists and estates while also making an investment in the careers of contemporary artists, including Torkwase Dyson, Loie Hollowell, Robert Nava, Adam Pendleton, and Marina Perez Simão.
Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher and President Samanthe Rubell, Pace has established itself as a collaborative force in the art world, partnering with other galleries and nonprofit organizations around the world in recent years. The gallery advances its mission to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences and collectors around the world through a robust global program anchored by its exhibitions of both 20th century and contemporary art and scholarly projects from its imprint Pace Publishing, which produces books introducing new voices to the art historical canon. This artist-first ethos also extends to public installations, philanthropic events, performances, and other interdisciplinary programming presented by Pace.
Today, Pace has eight locations worldwide, including two galleries in New York—its eight-story headquarters at 540 West 25th Street and an adjacent 8,000-square-foot exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. The gallery’s history in the New York art world dates to 1963, when it opened its first space in the city on East 57th Street. A champion of Light and Space artists, Pace has also been active in California for some 60 years, opening its West Coast flagship in Los Angeles in 2022. The gallery maintains European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where it established an office in 2023. Pace was one of the first international galleries to have a major presence in Asia, where it has been active since 2008, the year it first opened in Beijing’s vibrant 798 Art District. It now operates galleries in Hong Kong and Seoul and opens its first gallery in Japan in Tokyo’s Azabudai Hills development in 2024.
Torkwase Dyson: Here is exhibiting at Pace’s Los Angeles location at 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90019. The exhibition opened on September 14 and will end on October 26, 2024. Photography courtesy Pace Gallery. 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.
