Torkwase Dyson: Here
Pace is pleased to present Here, an exhibition of new paintings by Torkwase Dyson at its Los Angeles gallery, as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide Participating Gallery Program.
On view from September 14 to October 26, the show will further explore ideas about the environment, architecture, infrastructure, and black space that are central to the artist’s practice. In her work across painting, sculpture, performance, film, and drawing, Dyson uncovers continuities between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture through a language of abstract, poetic forms. Her two- and three-dimensional abstractions grapple with the ways in which space is perceived, imagined, and negotiated—particularly by black and brown bodies—to examine histories of human geography and black spatial liberation strategies.
The new works that Dyson is debuting in her presentation at Pace in LA represent the fundamental parts of a large-scale assemblage in memory of black underwater towns. Practicing mindful improvisation in her making process, the artist has imbued these paintings with forms that speak to the beauty and hauntology of black abstraction in motion, or what she calls “black compositional thought.”
This upcoming exhibition in LA is a continuation of Dyson’s ongoing Bird and Lava series, which she began making in 2020 and first exhibited at Pace’s East Hampton gallery that year. With the paintings and drawings in this body of work, the artist poses a multifaceted expression of a question: “If blackness is already an architectonic developed out of liquidity (ocean), can the work embody this phenomenon and offer sensation (sensoria) at the register of liberation?”
Having created a compositional system of curvilinear and rectilinear shapes to apply across all her Bird and Lava works, Dyson articulates histories of enslavement, displacement, and resistance through the phenomenological presence of geometric abstraction, dimensionality, and gesture. For her latest paintings in this series—which are the focus of her show at Pace in LA—Dyson has experimented with new material elements, including details rendered in stone. In the artist’s view, the varied textures and geometries that appear throughout this series are thresholds, or portals, through which we might forge new spatial strategies of liberation. Holistically, Dyson’s installation for Here—attuned to enactments of precarity, liminality, and augmentation—invites contemplation and meditation.
Ahead of her exhibition at Pace in LA, the artist is presenting a large-scale sculpture in the 2024 Whitney Biennial in New York through August 11. The Whitney’s inaugural Hyundai Terrace Commission for site-specific projects, Liquid Shadows, Solid Dreams (A Monastic Playground) (2024) is installed outdoors on the museum’s fifth floor. The architecturally scaled geometries in the sculpture—which responds to the light conditions on the terrace over the course of the day and night—invite tactile engagement and activation from viewers. Exhibited within view of the Hudson River, this work also speaks to the interconnected ecological and social histories of New York City.