Message From My Room: Nathalie Du Pasquier

 Pace Gallery, Anton Kern Gallery, and A Palazzo Gallery 

Co-Present Three Solo Exhibitions of Nathalie Du Pasquier in June

 Pace Gallery, Anton Kern Gallery, and A Palazzo Gallery are pleased to present three concurrent solo exhibitions of work by Nathalie Du Pasquier this June. Pace Gallery’s online exhibition Spaces Between Things brings together more than a dozen works to trace Du Pasquier’s evolution from figurative, still-life compositions toward pure abstractions. Anton Kern Gallery’s online exhibition, Message From My Room, is comprised of new colored pencil drawings made this past March during lockdown at the artist’s home in Milan. Meanwhile, an installation entitled Constellation for A Palazzo Gallery —located at the noble floor of a prestigious 16th century palazzo in the center of Brescia, Italy — consists of a new site-specific installation combining an object, a three-dimensional architectural painting, alongside new works on canvas. Together, these three exhibitions consider the centrality of painting to Du Pasquier’s multifaceted practice, in which both architecture and drawing play significant roles. All three exhibitions will be on view from June 2 – 16, 2020.

During the 1980s, Nathalie Du Pasquier was a key figure in the Memphis Group, the renowned Milan-based movement in postmodern design led by Ettore Sottsass. In 1987, Du Pasquier put aside her work as a designer and dedicated herself exclusively to painting. For the three decades following this shift, she continued to challenge the possibilities of painting with still-life scenes based on arrangements of everyday objects composed in her studio, as well as with figurative depictions of three-dimensional wood constructions, which served as models for her early abstract compositions.

In a new essay that accompanies the exhibitions, Oliver Shultz, Pace Gallery Curatorial Director, writes that across media, “still life remains the essence of Du Pasquier’s approach to creating environments: each painting becomes an object within the larger arrangement.” Together, all three gallery exhibitions present the full scope of Du Pasquier’s work over the past decade, highlighting her robust creative output, which reaches far beyond her early contributions to the Memphis Group while returning to many of the ideas she explored during that period for the first time in thirty years.

ANTON KERN GALLERY (online) 

Message from My Room 

June 2 – 16, 2020 

Whether abstract or constructivist, the same boundary-blurring approach is evident in the artist’s most recent body of drawings, made over the course of three weeks in March of 2020, which are the subject of Anton Kern’s online exhibition. These new colored pencil drawings on blue paper reflect the artist’s state of enforced isolation during the first weeks of the Coronavirus outbreak in Milan, where Du Pasquier has lived and worked since 1979. 

The artist notes that “these drawings were done between March and April. On planet Earth it is springtime, on the radio we don't know if it is November or August. It does not really matter, time is still." As the city shut down and Du Pasquier’s existence was limited to life in the studio, drawing provided her a way of passing time in the absence of human contact. “I could not concentrate on painting and I found it more comfortable to sit at my table and make these drawings,” she explains, which “are like little paintings done with colored pencil.”

Online Exhibition Only.