Paul Pagk. Recent Works on Paper

About

The show, which comprises an installation of 18 drawings executed between 2020 and 2023, will be held at our 36 Orchard Street location.

Pagk has been ceaselessly producing works on paper since childhood. His vast output constitutes the nerve center of his sustained practice. Produced with urgency and speed, Pagk’s drawings are the locus from which, like a jazzman, the artist improvises and develops the motifs and variations that nurture his much slower paintings.

This exhibition is the first that focuses exclusively on this essential component of Pagk’s work.

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“I approach the paper sheet like an object, but it is also a volume. As opposed to my paintings, I don’t always limit my drawings to one dominant color; I tend to compose with color in my works on paper.

A painting is a painting even before it is painted. Stretched canvas on a stretcher equals painting, whereas a sheet of paper is not a drawing until you put something down on it. Paper has a use value. It can be used to write a letter, to write a novel, etc. Paper as support is also completely transparent; even if it is materially paper, it has a certain relationship to infinity.

When I devised this 15 by 11 inch format back in 2003, I was thinking of the resulting drawings as mental platforms, not exactly escapes from reality, but receptacles of gestures and structures. They were space maps, if you will, and still are today. It is more like in Asian painting, in which the viewer identifies with the small figures in the foreground preparing their journey into the pictorial field.

I draw in order to find ways to liberate myself from repetition.”

 —Paul Pagk
excerpts from a conversation with Miguel Abreu, 3/3/2024