Pace Prints is pleased to announce the opening of a long-term site-specific installation by Nicola López at the recently inaugurated Balcony Lounge at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Entitled Un-Building Things, the work is the first commission for the lounge and will be on view for three years.

Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings Samantha Rippner calls López "one of the most innovative printmakers working today." Continuing her practice of using printmaking in unexpected and unusual ways, López created Un-Building Things using linocut and monoprinting techniques on top of mylar forms that were laser-cut from hand-drawn stencils. The elements of the piece were printed and assembled by López, in collaboration with Pace Editions' printers, over the course of two months, then installed on-site in the Balcony Lounge by the artist.

In its final form, the piece begins as individually framed panels which evolve across the 50-foot space into a fractured constellation of architectural elements. As it progresses the elements transform into primary shapes that expand beyond the limits of frame and picture plane. The frames themselves also progressively break apart, and their parts become independent structures. This "un-building" reverses not only the construction of the architectural images, but also the art-making process itself. Complex forms and relationships dissolve into their core components, becoming at once completely individual but also more universal. López says: "What I'm interested in constructing is a landscape that does not have a specific geographic location, but that relates in its non-specificity to our contemporary urban world."

Located adjacent to the Great Hall Balcony, the Balcony Lounge is open to Metropolitan Museum of Art members at the Sustaining level and above.

Also on view through June 8 at Pace Prints, 521 West 26th Street, is Nicola López: Land of Illusion, an exhibition of López's new editioned and unique prints.

López was born in Sante Fe, NM and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She attended Columbia University in New York, NY, where she received her BA in 1998 and her MFA in 2004, and currently teaches at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in cities and countries including New York, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Peru and Germany.