New York, April 16, 2021 — Pace Gallery is pleased to announce representation of New York-based artist Damian Loeb ahead of his inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery opening May 19, 2021 in Palo Alto. Pace will co-represent the artist alongside Acquavella Galleries, with a focus on bringing his work to an even larger audience. Wishful Thinking will be on view through July 2, 2021.
Marc Glimcher, President & CEO, Pace Gallery, shares: “Damian works with the intensity of an ecclesiastical artist. His radiant depictions of celestial bodies and events present a new iconography of belief. Not to be confused with photorealism, Damian’s perfecting of the imagery is more devotional than it is analytic. While stemming from the last years of the Pictures Generation, his paintings speak to a consciousness of our 21st century.”
Damian Loeb shares: “As a huge fan of Pace Gallery, I am excited to join their incredible roster of artists, many of whom are long time heroes of mine. Marc’s insight and commitment to his artists is inspiring, as is the professionalism and expertise of his entire team. I look forward to working together with Pace and Acquavella Galleries to share my new and future works.”
Wishful Thinking, Loeb’s debut presentation with Pace, is an off-world homage to the history of allegorical painting and comprises eight new paintings created in 2020 and 2021. Celebrating the relevance of representational work in a conceptual world, Loeb extends the genre of landscape painting to encompass new realms, translating the 19th century Romantic ideals of the sublime into contemporary images of the universe. He manipulates scale and composition to capture the spiritual awe of extra-terrestrial scenes, using classical art tropes to convey the escapist beauty in these strangely familiar expanses. Alluding to the Pygmalion myth, the show’s title refers to the desire of a certain reality rather than what exists. These works present distant landscapes as welcoming and a possible future home, yet simultaneously highlight the failure of verisimilitude—the fact that they will forever remain an “ideal”.
Following the tradition of early Baroque painters, these transcendent paintings seek to offer a spiritual salve for modern times and reference classical myths to examine themes such as martyrdom, faith, and sacrifice in their contemplation on the human condition. In Danae and the Shower of Gold (after Rubens) (2020), viewers see the gaseous folds of Jupiter mirror the modesty of fabric and plentiful flesh presented in Rubens’ painting of the same name.
Moving toward a new level of abstraction, the artist invites viewers to contemplate questions about an individual’s place in the infinite through this new body of work. Loeb’s paintings are “wishful thinking”: a meditation on fate as it manifests itself in beauty, and a false resolution—offered by myth—to find lost hope by anthropomorphizing the vast and mysterious images of other worlds, seemingly closer and better than the present one
