Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce In Focus: Helen Pashgian. The special installation will focus on the Los Angeles-based Light and Space artist’s Untitled (2009) column works. Installed in the gallery’s black box space for optimal viewing in person—as these works were intended to be experienced—the columns create an immersive environment that represents the most recent evolution of Pashgian’s practice.

In Focus presentations are a recent addition to the Lehmann Maupin program that allow the gallery to highlight a crucial aspect of an artist’s practice. These installations offer public access to recent, or timely and significant works by the gallery’s artists and provide greater flexibility for Lehmann Maupin to contextualize its growing international program. Installed in the gallery at 501 West 24th Street, these presentations run concurrently with the gallery’s existing exhibition program.

Lehmann Maupin will show additional cast epoxy spheres and a mounted wall work by Pashgian at Frieze New York (Booth C23), May 2-5, 2019. The artist’s Untitled (dates vary) spheres represent an origin point in the artist’s practice, as they are among the earliest forms the artist experimented with. These works appear to simultaneously trap and emanate light, offering an ocular illusion that defies common perception. Several of the works exhibited in the In Focus presentation and at Frieze New York were included in the landmark exhibition Space Shifters, organized by Ralph Rugoff at the Hayward Gallery in London (2018-19). Together, the three bodies of work on view provide a comprehensive overview of this pioneering female figure of West Coast minimalism, whose influence is gaining increasing international understanding.

Helen Pashgian (b. 1934, Pasadena, CA; lives and works in Pasadena, CA) received her BA from Pomona College, Claremont, CA, in 1956 and MA from Boston University, Boston, in 1958, and also attended Columbia University, New York, 1956-57. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (2014); Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2010); and Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA (2007). Select group exhibitions featuring her work include Pacific Standard Time: Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950-1970, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2011), traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2011) and Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany (2012); Translucence: Southern California Art From the 1960s and 1970s, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA (2006); The Senses: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont, CA (2006); and Inaugural Exhibition, Pasadena Museum of California Art, Pasadena, CA (2002). Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections internationally, including Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.