Mar 10, 2017 – Apr 08, 2017

@Pace Gallery

Pace Gallery is pleased to present Lee Ufan: Ceramics, the first solo exhibition of the artist’s ceramic works in North America. Part of Asia Week New York, the exhibition will be on view from March 10 through April 8, 2017, at 32 East 57th Street. The works in this show were made in conjunction with the Manufacture de Sèvres, an atelier outside of Paris renowned for its production of porcelain and its longstanding history of working with artists. An opening reception for the artist will be held on Friday, March 10 from 6 to 8 p.m. Pace will publish a digital catalogue to accompany the exhibition, with an essay by Valérie Duponchelle.

Since the 18th century, Sèvres has invited artists to work in their ateliers in cooperation with their staff of working artisans, opening-up the process at all stages from the development of the material to the finishing techniques. Although Lee has been working with ceramics since the 1970s, he first discovered Sèvres in 1996. Lee Ufan: Ceramics is the result of a two-year collaboration with Manufacture de Sèvres, which began in 2014.

For this exhibition, Lee continues to demonstrate his philosophical concerns regarding materiality and existence, imbuing a sense of respectful intervention to the essential properties of the medium of clay. At the same time, it is the artist’s encounter with fire, an unconcerned participant yet a vital link to the process that creates a sense of phenomenon to the works. The range of sculpture in the show exhibits Lee’s dynamic engagement with this practice. New works on porcelain tiles show a use of color and brush that recalls the artist’s Dialogue series. His concept of composition in these works as exposing the connection between the unmarked and the gesture in turn emphasize the relationship of the object to the environment in which it sits. In contrast, Lee’s terracotta works disrupt the three-dimensional surface in a variety of ways, creating an interplay between perception and space.

For the artist, his "initial intention [in making these ceramic works] is the fragment, ruin and the distortion of meaning and usage." On view in the exhibition will be a sculpture, standing at over five feet and made entirely of broken fragments and powder from ceramic works that were intentionally shattered. The amassing of these broken elements is topped with a "perfect" vessel, which at once depicts destruction and creation through the passage of time.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Lee Ufan will give a talk on ceramics at Asia Society, New York on Wednesday, March 8 at 6:30 p.m.

Lee Ufan (b. 1936, Kyongsang-namdo, Korea) emerged as one of the founders and major proponents of the avant-garde Mono-ha ("School of Things") group in the late 1960s. Mono-ha was Japan’s first internationally recognized contemporary art movement, rejecting Western notions of representation and emphasizing materials and perception and interrelationships between space and matter. Lee creates his sculptural works using only two materials: steel and stone. In 1970, the artist explained that “[t]he highest level of expression is not to create something from nothing, but rather to nudge something that already exists so that the world shows up more vividly.” Recently, Lee has presented two major solo exhibitions: Marking Infinity at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2011) and at the prestigious Chateau de Versailles in France (2014). This is the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery, followed by presentations in New York in 2008 and 2009; From Point, From Line, From Wind at Pace London in 2015; and New Works at Pace Hong Kong in 2016.

Lee has been represented by Pace since 2007.