First Look: FOG Design+Art

Pace Gallery is pleased to announce details of its presentation at FOG Design+Art in San Francisco from January 18–21, 2024.

The gallery’s booth (#212) will showcase its contemporary program with a strong focus on women artists, featuring works by Mary Corse, Huong Dodinh, Sonia Gomes, Alicja Kwade, Arlene Shechet, and Mika Tajima as well as Robert Longo, Hank Willis Thomas, and others.

A vibrant new painting from Mika Tajima’s Art d'Ameublement series—named for French composer Erik Satie’s furniture music, or musique d’ameublement—will figure prominently on the booth. In her Art d'Ameublement paintings, each of which is subtitled with an uninhabited geographic location, the artist creates vivid color gradients through her application of airborne paint atop transparent acrylic shells. This presentation of Art d'Ameublement (Pedra Oneal) (2023) at FOG will coincide with Tajima’s upcoming solo exhibition, titled Energetics, opening at Pace’s New York gallery on January 12, 2024.

Paintings by Mary Corse—who is based in Los Angeles and was born in Berkeley, California—and Huong Dodinh will also be on view. In her new Multiband composition, Corse uses glass microspheres to give the impression that her canvas is lit from within, refracting light from different angles depending on the viewer’s position. Meanwhile, a recent painting from Dodinh’s K.A. series, which she began in the early 2000s, speaks to the artist’s ability to imbue her delicate geometric abstractions with radiance and depth.

The booth will also spotlight A Way with Eyes (2023), a new retroreflective work by Hank Willis Thomas. As with Thomas’s other retroreflective works, A Way with Eyes exposes latent images depending on lighting and the perspective of the viewer. Seen from one perspective, these artworks present bold figurations, abstractions, and landscapes in saturated colors; seen from another, fragmented archival images Thomas has used in his artistic production over the last decade are revealed. As these elements converge and transform, they shed light on new layers of images, ideas, and meanings that are hidden in plain sight. Referencing the work of Henri Matisse in A Way with Eyes, Thomas continues his exploration of international, intergenerational histories of abstraction with this new composition.

In addition, a large-scale charcoal drawing by Robert Longo will be presented on Pace’s booth at the fair. In Untitled (Lanserhof Forest) (2023), which measures ten feet wide, the artist depicts a dense congregation of snow-coated trees with razor-sharp precision. Despite his highly detailed, hyper-realistic approach, Longo emphasizes the abstract qualities of this forest scene, drawing out the patterns and textures of the trees and snow.

Highlights will also include a new mixed media work by Alicja Kwade, who recently joined Pace’s program and often engages with scientific and philosophical subjects in her practice; a new hanging sculpture from Sonia Gomes’s Pendente series, featuring ornate abstractions rendered in fabric, rope, lace, beads, and buttons; and First Born (2023), an intimately scaled sculpture by Arlene Shechet, known for her idiosyncratic, biomorphic, boldly colored sculptures that situate seemingly disparate, incongruous materials and forms in lively conversations.