Pace is pleased to present Graphein, the first solo UK exhibition featuring new works by the Mexican artist Bosco Sodi. Graphein will be on view at Pace London, 6-10 Lexington Street, from 5 September to 4 October 2013.

Focusing on material exploration, the creative gesture, and the spiritual connection between the artist and his work, Sodi seeks to transcend conceptual barriers.

Graphein features seven graphite large-scale unique and unconventional monochromatic paintings created this year, and continue Sodi’s use of pure pigment, sawdust, wood pulp, natural fibers, water, and glue.

Sodi does not use a brush, but constructs the works directly on the ground referencing Jackson Pollock’s action paintings. Once the controlled methods of creation have ceased, these canvases go through a drying process in which external factors, due to the location of his studios, alter the appearance of the sculptural relief of his canvases. A plethora of tiny cracks and large fissures appear in the surface creating a monochromatic terrain that resembles the scorched earth. The lack of control of the formation of the cracking plays an important role in Sodi’s creative process, leaving any interpretation to the viewer.

Each of Sodi’s paintings is a summary of his memories and collective experiences, made present by a direct method of creating, which demands his full physical and emotional participation. “Sodi’s personal aesthetic view is realised through an arduous physical processing and manipulation of materials. But at the same time further characterised by their being inseparably embedded within the creative phenomenological intuitions that the materials are able to both generate and revivify.  It is a personal equation where past and present experiences and associations are brought each time into a unique state of provisional internal unity.” as critic, art historian and curator Mark Gisbourne explains.

Graphein references the Greek origin of the word graphite and functions as an assertion of the painting's physicality without reference to ideas beyond the viewer's experience of the work's immediate presence. Sodi leaves his paintings untitled, with the intention of removing any connection beyond the work’s immediate existence. The work itself remains, and is a memory of the conversation with the raw material that brought the painting into being.

Sodi’s works tend to defy any categorisation but are influenced by movements such as l’art informel and colourists such as Willem de Kooning or Mark Rothko. As Gisbourne writes, “any attempt to simply reduce the artworks of Bosco Sodi to material visual analysis alone is largely to misunderstand the creative nature of their contents.”   

NOTES TO EDITORS

Bosco Sodi

Pace

Pace is a leading contemporary art gallery representing many of the most significant international artists and estates of the 20th and 21st centuries. Founded by Arne Glimcher in Boston in 1960 and led by Marc Glimcher, Pace has been a constant, vital force in the art world and has introduced many renowned artists’ work to the public for the first time. Pace has mounted more than 700 exhibitions, including scholarly exhibitions that have subsequently travelled to museums, and published nearly 400 exhibition catalogues. Today Pace has seven locations worldwide: four in New York; two in London; and one in Beijing. Pace inaugurated its flagship gallery at 6 Burlington Gardens with the exhibition Rothko/Sugimoto: Dark Paintings and Seascapes in the autumn of 2012.

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