Located in the Karakoram range along the Pakistan-China border, K2 is the world’s second-highest mountain and one of its most formidable peaks. Michael Kagan’s new monotype silkscreens, Surface to Air, reimagine the imposing summit, rendering five distinct iterations of K2’s apex, on view at Pace Prints Chelsea from October 15–November 14, 2026, at 536 West 22nd Street.
Created in collaboration with Brand X Editions, Surface to Air takes its title from the threshold between terrain and atmosphere: the point at which the physical mass of the mountain meets the space surrounding it. As K2 rises through each composition, shifts in texture and color destabilize its surface, extending Kagan’s ongoing interest in scale and subjects that test the limits of human experience. Characteristic of Kagan’s practice, each image is immediately legible from a distance yet increasingly abstract at close range. K2 appears monumental, heroic in scale, before dissolving into a kinetic collision of marks, fractured textures, and dense passages of cobalt. The mountain remains fixed in form while its surface is continually reconfigured—solid and unstable, recognizable and painterly alike.
About Michael Kagan
Michael Kagan holds a BA from George Washington University and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art, where he completed an additional postgraduate fellowship in 2006. Kagan’s work has been the subject of a great number of solo shows, including Moonwalkers at Almine Rech in Paris, France, and I Was There When It Happened at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in Virginia Beach, VA. His work is held in many public collections, including Maki Collection in Tokyo, Japan; Hall Collection in Reading, VT, USA; Gemini Trust Company in New York, NY, USA; Founders Fund in San Francisco, CA, USA; and the Maezawa Collection, Chiba, Japan, among others. He has worked on a number of successful commercial projects, including a collaboration with Pharrell Williams, and an award-winning album cover for White Lies’ album Big TV.
