Unlimited: Helen Pashgian
On the occasion of Art Basel Unlimited, Lehmann Maupin presents a large-scale project between long-time friends and collaborators, artist Helen Pashgian and world renowned architect Kulapat Yantrasast. This unique presentation marks the first time Pashgian’s work is exhibited at Unlimited and the first occasion during which the two are partnering to realize a public activation.
Debuting at Unlimited is the first iteration of their collaboration: a site-specific Pavilion designed by Yantrasast to house one of Pashgian’s celebrated 50-inch Lens works. Intended to marry art with architecture and color with form, the Pavilion offers a meditative space in which viewers can engage Pashgian’s work to its fullest. It features curved walls, soft transitioning lighting, and warm-hued walls, which together render the optimal viewing conditions for Pasghian’s work. While the project on view features a single work, Yantrasast and Pashgian have developed alternative concepts which correlate to her range of innovative sculptures, from large-scale Lenses and Columns, to more intimately-scaled Spheres.
Presented here is one of Pashgian’s yellow Lenses. The artist revisited this series in 2010s and is now pushing the scale and visual immateriality of these works to their limit, creating seductive optical effects that transfix the viewer. The series features technically and aesthetically challenging discs of color suspended in space, which create the illusion that the cast urethane sculpture is both floating in front of and simultaneously receding into the wall behind it—an effect similar to watching the sunset on the horizon. These works appear to hover between materiality and immateriality, becoming and dissolving, and in doing so, most clearly illustrate Pashgian’s ability to engage light as a material that alters, changes, and seemingly dematerializes an object.