This is Siena’s second solo show with Pace Prints. The exhibition will feature new prints and explorations in Siena’s signature freeform formal constraint patterns. Siena’s complex, rule-based linear abstractions have situated him firmly within the trajectory of modern American art, with his “visual algorithms” resulting in intensely concentrated, vibrantly-colored, freehand geometric patterns. A highlight of the exhibition, Sequence Two, a new woodcut edition of 21, is based on two separate comb sequences interlocking and spiraling in a labyrinthine pattern. In addition, other new woodcuts and wood engravings created at the Pace Editions studios will be shown.
James Siena (b. 1957, California) received his BFA from Cornell University in 1979, with his first solo exhibition in 1981 in New York City. Siena’s work has been featured in over 110 solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial. Siena has been the recipient of multiple honors and awards including the Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2000); the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Competition Award (1999); and The New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting (1994).
Siena’s work is in the collections of many museums throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, Missouri; Des Moines Art Center, Iowa; The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Philip Morris Collection, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.