Lee Ufan and Claude Viallat: Encounter

Pace Gallery is honoured to present an exhibition which brings together the works of Lee Ufan and Claude Viallat, curated by Alfred Pacquement. Spanning more than five decades, this exhibition will survey both artists’ enduring commitment to abstraction as a means of engaging philosophical ideas of time, space, and matter. At the centre of this dialogue, is an exploration of materiality from both a formal and metaphysical perspective.

Both born in 1936, Lee and Viallat have dedicated nearly seven decades to their respective practices and founded major artistic movements: Mono Ha in Japan and Supports/Surfaces in France, respectively. Despite differing geographies and contexts, Lee and Viallat are united by their rejection of traditional methods of art making and their innovative approach to materiality. Comprising painting, sculpture, and installation, Lee’s practice investigates the capacities of action and process as ways of engaging the relationships between the body and temporality. For Viallat, radical rethinking of materials led him to eschew the stretcher or support in order to treat the canvas as a sculptural object, fundamentally subverting the conventions of painting. Encompassing both significant historical – many of which have never been seen in the UK before – as well as new works, this exhibition is testament to these artists’ continued dedication to boundary breaking practices, past and present.