Nina Katchadourian: Natural Selection
Pace Gallery | Hong Kong
November 19 – December 23, 2021
12/F, H Queen's
80 Queen's Road Central
Hong Kong
Hong Kong – Pace is pleased to present Nina Katchadourian: Natural Selection at its Hong Kong space, marking the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery in Asia. The presentation runs from November 19 to December 23 and it will be complemented by an online exhibition of works from the artist’s new Fake Plants series.
In many projects spanning several decades, Nina Katchadourian has considered the contradictory implications of the word “natural” and explored the relationships between human and non-human animals, sometimes intervening in ways she terms “uninvited collaborations with nature.” For the Mended Spiderwebs series (1998), Katchadourian mended broken spiderwebs with red sewing thread only to discover that the spider always rejected her repairs, threw out the patches, and repaired the web with its own thread. She “fixed” a mushroom using a bicycle tire patch kit and subsequently photographed it to create Renovated Mushroom (1998). In Artificial Insemination (1998), an iconic scientific image—the moment when a sperm fertilizes an egg—is deliberately misunderstood and restaged: Katchadourian reimagines the scene using tadpoles fished out of a pond and a chicken’s egg placed in water on a dinner plate.
Katchadourian’s explorations of this kind are often the result of spontaneous play and experimentation on Pörtö, a small island group in the southern Finnish archipelago, where she grew up spending summers with her family. Some works reflect a humorous, curious approach to the world and her place within it. Others, including Too Late (2021), a photograph of an abandoned bird’s nest in which seven eggs display the work’s title in capital letters, convey a distinct sense of despair. Another such work, the video installation Fugitive (2007), shows an orangutan traveling endlessly along a set of hanging wires, trapped within the loop of the monitors that display the zoo environment in which the creature lives.
At the onset of the pandemic, Katchadourian began making artificial plants in her Berlin apartment using materials like discarded cardboard boxes, paper packaging from food products, disposable medical masks, cardboard toilet paper tubes, ping pong balls, sewing pins, toothpicks, and leftover craft supplies. In a new series, titled Fake Plant (2021), the artist’s longstanding methodology of working with mundane materials close at hand intersects with her intense interest in “the natural.” Katchadourian harvests the cast-off materials she finds around her home, in her studio, or at a construction site she frequently passes and transforms them into multifarious plant forms. Katchadourian’s plants are based on her recollection and invention rather than accurate representations of existing species. Although these works take the form of peculiar flora and fauna belonging to unexplored or imagined landscapes, they ultimately bring viewers closer to the overlooked, familiar matter that constitutes their domestic lives.
Nina Katchadourian (b. 1968, Stanford, California) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and public projects. Her video Accent Elimination was included at the 2015 Venice Biennial in the Armenian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Group exhibitions have included shows at the Serpentine Gallery, Turner Contemporary, de Appel, Palais de Tokyo, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Turku Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, ICA Philadelphia, Brooklyn Museum, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and MoMA PS1. A solo museum survey of her work entitled Curiouser opened at the Blanton Museum in 2017 and traveled to the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University and the BYU Museum of Art. An accompanying monograph, also entitled Curiouser, is available from Tower Books.
Katchadourian completed a commission entitled Floater Theater for the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 2016 which is now permanently on view. In 2016 Katchadourian created Dust Gathering, an audio tour on the subject of dust, for the Museum of Modern Art as part of their program “Artists Experiment”. Katchadourian’s work is in public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Morgan Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Margulies Collection, and Saatchi Gallery. She has won grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Gronqvista Foundation, and the Nancy Graves Foundation. Katchadourian lives and works in Brooklyn and Berlin and she is a Clinical Full Professor on the faculty of NYU Gallatin. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery and Pace Gallery.
Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coaststhrough its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.
Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of President and CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remainingat the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program—comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.
The gallery has also spearheaded explorations into the intersection of art and technology through its new business models, exhibition interpretation tools, and representation of artists cultivating advanced studio practices. Pace’s presence in Silicon Valley since 2016 has bolstered its longstanding support of experimental practices and digital artmaking. As part of its commitment to innovative, technologically engaged artists within and beyond its program, Pace will launch its own dedicated NFT platform in November 2021. The gallery’s past NFT projects have spotlighted digital works by Lucas Samaras, Simon Denny, Urs Fischer, John Gerrard, and other artists.
Today, Pace has nine locations worldwide including London, Geneva, a strong foothold in Palo Alto, and two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, as well as an office and viewing room in Beijing. In 2020, Pace opened temporary exhibition spaces in East Hampton and Palm Beach, with continued programming on a seasonal basis.
To know more about the artist and the exhibition, please contact:
hongkong@pacegallery.com +852 26085065
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