Pace is pleased to present STUFF, an expansive group exhibition organized by sculptor Arlene Shechet, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York
The show brings together work by more than 50 artists within and beyond Pace’s program, including Lynda Benglis, Huma Bhabha, Nicole Eisenman, Peter Hujar, Wifredo Lam, Arthur Jafa, Donald Judd, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Tony Smith, Mickalene Thomas, Lawrence Weiner, and Stanley Whitney. Shechet’s installation of these varied works, presented in dialogue with one another, will offer new and unexpected associations, cultivating connections across time and place while forging a dynamic patchwork of exchanges and meanings. A deeply personal expression of Shechet’s love of art, the exhibition, which eschews historical and chronological constraints in its format, speaks to art’s ability to reinvent, engage, and adapt into new conversations.
As part of the continuum of her practice, curation is one avenue through which Shechet invigorates her own work in the studio. Like her process for creating idiosyncratic, abstract sculptures, the artist takes an improvisatory, intuitive approach to her curatorial work. Developing an exhibition over time as part of a non-linear progression of ideas and impulses, Shechet relates artworks to one another by way of an internal logic. In this way, the installations she creates are as vital as their contents.
Shechet’s curatorial credits include Meissen Recast (2014) at the RISD Museum, Providence; From Here On Now (2016-17) at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Porcelain, No Simple Matter: Arlene Shechet and the Arnhold Collection (2016-17) at the Frick Collection, New York; and Making Knowing: Three Takes on the Jack Shear Drawing Collection (2021) at the Drawing Center, New York. She also contributed to a film and audio tour produced by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for the ongoing exhibition Philip Guston Now.
In STUFF, Shechet draws new resonances among the works on view, which span various art historical periods. The exhibition does not purport to be a comprehensive survey. Rather, it can be understood as a spirited gathering of works that the artist cares about and aims to present in unconventional ways. STUFF opens with Hujar’s 1974 photograph of writer Fran Lebowitz in her childhood bedroom—the work hangs on a wall covered with Shechet’s own interpretation of Lebowitz’s bedroom wallpaper. This wallpaper, featured on adjoining walls, binds together a thread of domesticity that runs through the show, pronounced in works like Eisenman’s Sunday Night Dinner (2009), Thomas’s collages, Claes Oldenburg’s Ghost Fan (1967), Dike Blair’s paintings, Betsy Kaufman’s needlepoint, and Roy McMakin’s pencil drawings of merging jars.
The vibrancy that emanates from the wallpaper’s abstract pattern hints at another thematic focus in the show: the cosmic diagram. For Shechet, the everyday and the cosmic are very much related. Ad Reinhardt digs into this idea with Preliminary Sketch for ''A Portend of the Artist as a Yhung Mandala'' (1956). Other works in the show—including Alfred Jensen’s metaphysical and mathematical compositions, Forrest Bess’s written dreams and their related paintings, Harry Smith’s string drawing, and Guo Fengyi’s referencing of the body’s meridians—play in this dimension. Joining them are Jafa’s Untitled (2022), Piet Mondrian’s Pier and Ocean 3 (1914), Nevelson’s early plexiglass sculpture, Barry Le Va’s abstraction, and Fred Sandback’s corner string sculpture. One piece connects with another in fresh and often unanticipated ways.
This summer, Shechet will be the subject of a solo exhibition at ‘T’ Space in Rhinebeck, New York, where her sculptural installation will be on view from July 17 to August 28. Also in summer 2022, Disrupt the View: Arlene Shechet and the Harvard Art Museums will open at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge.
