Paul Pagk

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Paul Pagk’s Recent Works on Paper, his second solo exhibition at the gallery. The show is comprised of an installation of 18 drawings executed between 2020 and 2023.

Pagk has been incessantly 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 where, like a jazzman, the artist improvises and develops the motifs and variations that nurture his much slower paintings.

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

I approach the paper sheet like an object, but it is also a volume. As opposed to in 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 figure in the foreground preparing their journey into the pictorial field.

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

—Paul Pagk

Paul Pagk (b. 1962, Crawley, UK) lives and works in New York. Institutional surveys of his work were held at the Centre d’Arts Plastiques, Royan (2022), the Fondation Fernet-Branca, Saint-Louis (2021) and C.R.A.C. Montbéliard (1999) all in France. He had solo exhibitions at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2023), Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris (2019, 2016 & 2014), Baukunst Galerie, Cologne (2008), Markus Winter, Berlin (2007), CRG Gallery, New York (1995 & 1994), Thread Waxing Space, New York (1993 & 1991), Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris (1987), among others. Recently, his work was included in Singing in Unison: Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale That Society Has the Capacity to Destroy, Part 6, curated by Phong H. Bui at Miguel Abreu Gallery (2022). Pagk’s work is in the permanent collections of the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (FNAC), Paris; Les Abattoirs, Toulouse; FRAC Picardie, France;, Pinault Collection; Springfield Museum of Art, OH; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, NH, among others.