Monument to the Unimportant

Pace presents Monument to the Unimportant, a group exhibition bringing together sculptures, paintings, works on paper, and an installation that each take the everyday object as a point of departure, revealing art’s enduring ability to transform the overlooked into sites of inquiry and visions of delight.

Monument to the Unimportant will include works by Henni Alftan, Genesis Belanger, Keith Coventry, Elmgreen & Dragset, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Urs Fischer, Sylvie Fleury, Robert Gober, David Hockney, Konrad Klapheck, Jac Leirner, Tony Matelli, Claes Oldenburg, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Wayne Thiebaud, Rachel Whiteread, Erwin Wurm, and B. Wurtz.

Often directly mimetic, these works upturn visual hierarchies in fine art and propose that the mundane can be harnessed to monumental effect. Spanning over 60 years of making, they share common subjects: cakes abound in the work of Oldenburg and Thiebaud; the architecture of the home inspires Wurm and Belanger’s sculptures; and both Klapheck and Hockney illuminate the infrastructure—the cabling and piping—of daily life. These resonances suggest that, while what we choose to celebrate differs across cultures and times, the unimportant almost always relates to the domestic, the alimentary, and the excretory.
The artists in this exhibition elevate their subjects from the invisibility of everyday life using a variety of contextual, material, and formal devices.