Pace Gallery Adds Nina Katchadourian to Roster in Advance of Opening New Home -ARTnews

Pace Gallery, which will unveil its new eight-floor headquarters in New York next week, has been expanding in other ways with new representation of artists including Sam Gilliam and Jo Baer, and initiatives like PaceX, which will commission art-and-technology projects. Now the gallery has added yet another artist to its roster.

New to the Pace stable is Nina Katchadourian, the Brooklyn- and Berlin-based conceptual artist whose work explores the many ways in which viewers determine what might be worthy of attention. Pace will share representation of the artist with her longtime San Francisco gallery, Catharine Clark.

“I’m incredibly happy,” Katchadourian told ARTnews. “I’ve never worked with a gallery that operates on this scale, and there are going to be great things about their reach.”

Katchadourian’s work has taken a variety of forms, though she is perhaps best known for her ongoing “Seat Assignment” series, which she began in 2010 and has continued since with photographs and videos taken mid-flight on airplanes using a phone camera. (Some new works from the series will be shown by Pace at the FIAC art fair in Paris in October.) Other works have dealt with collections of dust at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and assemblages of books whose titles reveal hidden messages.

At its new New York home, Pace is growing its program to include a greater emphasis on performance and other time-based work of a kind that Katchadourian that has favored in the past. The new flagship building includes a 150-seat space designated for live events, and the gallery recently hired Mark Beasley, who previously served as a curator of media and performance art at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., to oversee the multidisciplinary program to be staged there.

Katchadourian—who has shows forthcoming at New York’s 601 Artspace and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, as well as the Morgan Library & Museum in 2022—said she hopes Pace’s multivalent programming will allow the gallery to support the more expansive aspects of her oeuvre. “I made it very clear that I do a lot of different things,” she said, “and I want to keep doing that. It was a fruitful conversation.”