This summer PaceWildenstein presents A Walk on the Beach, featuring thirteen sculptures, paintings, and works on paper by Jim Dine, Tim Eitel, Alex Katz, Maya Lin, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Saul Steinberg, James Siena, and Keith Tyson. The exhibition will beon view at 534 West 25th Street, Ne... Read more
This summer PaceWildenstein presents A Walk on the Beach, featuring thirteen sculptures, paintings, and works on paper by Jim Dine, Tim Eitel, Alex Katz, Maya Lin, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Saul Steinberg, James Siena, and Keith Tyson. The exhibition will beon view at 534 West 25th Street, New York City through July 31, 2009. Corban Walker: New Installation remains on view in the adjacent gallery through July 31st as well.
A Walk on the Beach features Henri Matisse’s nearly 6′ × 12′ silkscreen maquette Océanie, le ciel. This, along with Océanie, la mer, represents the artist’s first attempt to use paper cutouts to make large compositions. The cut-out white forms were inspired by Matisse’s stay in Tahiti in 1930, fifteen years prior. Essentially drawing with scissors, Matisse’s new linear and formal approach to his practice would become the method for his subsequent large-scale work.
Piet Mondrian first turned to the theme of the sea during lengthy sojourns in the village of Domburg on the coast of Zeeland (1909-11), creating works such as the 37″ × 63″ charcoal on paper Reclining Nude (Dunes and Sea), 1910, one of two works on paper on view in this exhibition. Influenced by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the artist began approaching abstraction through Cubism in 1912-1914. In Pier and Ocean 3, 1914, the abstract pier extends into an ocean of short vertical and horizontal lines. Mondrian captures the flickering light and movement on water as he reduces the motion of the waves and the contact with breakwaters to their most essential pictorial form.
Inspired by studies of naturally occurring wave formations, Maya Lin used the concept of fluid dynamics and applied sophisticated cartographic methods to translate the scale, pacing, and pattern of mid-sea waves into gravel, earth, and grass in her large-scale wave earthworks. The model for her first Wavefield (installed at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1995), made out of recycled glass, is on view in this exhibition. The show also features James Siena’s Drawing after Lighthouse, Second Version, 2000, colored pencil on board (10-3/4″ × 8-1/4") and Keith Tyson’smixed media on watercolor paper Thought Bubbles Emerging within the Oceans of Jellyfish Nirvana, 2001-2007,from his Geno Pheno series.
Alex Katz captures his wife and muse, Ada, on the beach against the cobalt blue waters of the Maine harbor in his 6′ × 16′ oil on canvas, Harbor #8, 1999. Tim Eitel’s nearly 9’ tall oil on linen, Schwarzer Sand (2004) and two paintings (both 9-7/8″ × 7-7/8") of solitary male figures in sand dunes: Landeinwarts (Upcountry) and Sand, are also on view. Sunsets #1, a watercolor crayon and ink on paper from 1971 by the cartoonist-artist Saul Steinberg is also part of the exhibition.
Other important works featured in A Walk on the Beach include Jim Dine’s rendering of conch shells in oil, acrylic, charcoal, and pastel on canvas and paper, Key West Picture (1981) and his bronze sculpture from 1983, The Shell and the Log, where the log becomes both part of the work and the pedestal for a bronze conch shell. One of the founders of Pop Art in the early 1960s, Dine is best known for his series of hearts, tools, Venuses, and bathrobes—images that have become icons of American culture. The conch shell first appeared in Dine’s still-life paintings in 1978.
