On view beginning July 8 is Portfolio, a spotlight on iconic portfolios published by Pace Prints since the 1980s. This exhibition will focus on the works of Jenny Holzer, Robert Mangold, Vik Muniz, Wangechi Mutu, Ed Ruscha, and Shahzia Sikander. Concurrently, our Project Room will feature Terry Winters’ 1992 portfolio of 25 etchings entitled Field Notes. These exhibitions will be on view through August 13, 2021 at Pace Prints, 521 West 26th Street, 3rd floor.
Each portfolio on view expands an idea by the artist, in a lattice of repetition and variation that reveals multiple facets of a core concept. The portfolio After Motherwell (Pictures of Ink) I-VIII by Vik Muniz features the artist’s signature use of photography to reimagine images that already exist. In this instance, ink is photographed and printed digitally, to echo the painted abstractions of Robert Motherwell.
Within Wangechi Mutu’s The Original Nine Daughters the artist builds upon existing mythology. Mutu noted that the works she was making in this period “was a lot of taking these posed, very fictional females and extracting meaning out of them and squeezing a new discussion into them.” Each of the nine prints, presented in artist-designed frames, are a combination of traditional printmaking (etching and linocut) and collaged digitally printed images.
Shahzia Sikander’s, Portrait of the Artist (2016), is a portfolio of four etchings includes an original colophon text by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar. The portfolio references historical Miraj paintings of the visionary night journey of the Prophet Muhammad, a salient motif in Central Asian and Indo-Persian miniature painting. “Within the crystallized representations of the Miraj,” explains Sikander, “the artist’s portraits function as vessels through which history passes.”
Jenny Holzer’s abstractions made from redacted documents in Conclusion (2016) and Ed Ruscha’s elevation of an everyday object-themed Sunliners (1995) explore distinct subjects but all offer windows into the artists’ thought processes in a way that a single work rarely does.