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Feb 23, 2018

Acconci Studio News

Acconci Studio Joins Pace Gallery

New York—Pace Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of Acconci Studio. Vito Acconci (1940 – 2017) is a subversive and radical maker whose work expands writing into activities, installations, architecture and design. One of the most inventive figures to emerge during the Post-Pop era of the late 1960s and mid-1970s, Acconci’s influence permeates today’s creative landscape.

Working closely with Acconci Studio, Maria Acconci and Art Agency, Partners (AAP), Pace Gallery will present the broad scope of Acconci’s work—including projects that were never realized—and will continue to advance international appreciation and engagement with his iconic practice.

photo : Vito Acconci, Mur Island, Graz, Austria, 2015. Photo by Maria Acconci. Courtesy Acconci Studio and Pace Gallery.

“A truly innovative creator and agitator who was foundational to contemporary art today, Acconci fits perfectly within Pace’s program of leading 20th and 21st century artists and estates,” said Marc Glimcher, Pace Gallery President and CEO. “There’s still so much of his practice to uncover and reexamine and we’re thrilled to join with Maria Acconci to share Vito Acconci’s vision and expand his legacy around the world.”

“As AAP is working with Acconci Studio in the management of the estate, we recommended the selection of Pace as their gallery to provide an international platform for the presentation of Acconci’s work,” said Christy MacLear, Vice Chairman of AAP.
Vito Acconci (1940 – 2017, Bronx, New York) was part of a creative generation that came on the heels of Minimalists. Acconci’s work was a reaction against the “father-art” that he said he needed to kill. “Because [Robert] Smithson went outside, I could go inside,” he told fellow artist Richard Prince in an interview for Bomb Magazine in 1991. “I had to go somewhere else—inside myself.”

He initially pursued writing, enrolling in the University of Iowa’s MFA writing program in the early 1960s. In 1967 he co-founded the independent magazine 0 to 9, through which his own work transitioned to intermedia while the magazine became a model for future collaborative journals.

Then, in 1968, he embarked on an eight-year period in which he expanded writing into street works, & interventions relayed via hand written text, photography, sound, film & video. Some of his best-known works from this period, such as Following Piece (1969), Trademarks (1970), and Seedbed (1972), were cornerstones of this era and have had an outsize influence on his peers and later generations of artists.

Acconci’s work continued to transform during the mid-1970s, positioning him as an unconventional architect who would go on to design structures from a wide range of materials. He founded Acconci Studio in 1988. His public works—many of which were never realized—are provocative and memorable, while his architectural work combines design, architecture and environmental use at once.

One of his best-known works is Mur Island, for Graz, Austria (2003), a floating platform in the middle of Mur river that was commissioned on the occasion of Austria’s being named as the European Capital of Culture. Vito Acconci was named Design Miami Designer of the Year in 2012. Where We Are Now (Who Are We Anyway?), his retrospective of early works from 1968 to 1976, was designed by Vito + Maria Acconci and took over the 3rd floor of MoMA PS1 in 2016.

Pace is a leading contemporary art gallery representing many of the most significant international artists and estates of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Under the leadership of President and CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace is a vital force within the art world and plays a critical role in shaping the history, creation, and engagement with modern and contemporary art. Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy for vibrant and dedicated relationships with renowned artists. As the gallery approaches the start of its seventh decade, Pace’s mission continues to be inspired by our drive to support the world’s most influential and innovative artists and to share their visionary work with people around the world.

Pace advances this mission through its dynamic global program, comprising ambitious exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, and curatorial research and writing. Today, Pace has eight locations worldwide: three galleries in New York; one in London; one in Palo Alto, California; one in Beijing; one in Hong Kong; and one in Seoul. Pace will open its second gallery in Hong Kong, as well as a new space in Geneva in March 2018; and will open a new flagship gallery in New York, anticipated for completion in fall 2019. In 2016, Pace joined with Futurecity to launch FuturePace – an international cultural partnership innovating multidisciplinary projects for art in the public realm.

Art Agency, Partners is a bespoke art advisory firm founded in 2014.
Having identified a growing awareness of the need to carefully build and steward artists’ legacies, in 2017 AAP expanded to include a division dedicated to providing advisory services for living artists as well as artists’ estates and foundations to guide them through all aspects of legacy planning and estate management.

By offering a range of services including developing mission-based legacy programs such as grant-making and artist residencies, supporting market-management, planning for archive placement, assisting with exhibition planning, and generating scholarship and oral histories, AAP aims to thoughtfully advise artists, estates and foundations through the challenging, but ultimately rewarding, process of creating an estate plan or forming a foundation. AAP’s approach is artist-centered and comprehensive, identifying an artist’s core values and creative vision, to help form long-term plans for sustaining their vision. AAP is a subsidiary of Sotheby’s.

Maria Acconci, Principal of Acconci Studio, is committed to the long-term legacy of the Estate of Vito Acconci and to expanding Vito Acconci’s vision through her work at Acconci Studio. She describes Acconci Studio in the words of its founder. “In the late 1980’s Acconci Studio formed as a design firm that mixes poetry & geometry, computer-scripting & sentence-structure, narrative & biology, chemistry & social-science.

The Studio uses computers to give form to thinking; we use forms to find ideas. We make not nodes so much as circulation-routes, we design time as much as space. Acconci Studio’s design starts with clothing & ends with vehicles – in-between, we design buildings that slip into landscape & vice versa; we make spaces fluid, changeable & portable; we make architecture subservient to people & not vice versa — we anticipate cities on the move.” – Vito Acconci

Acconci Studio – Key Projects

Major buildings by Acconci Studio, chronological:

PermMuseumXXI architectural competition entry, Perm, Russia
Date built: 2008

picture from architect studio
Acconci Studio design – Perm Museum Competition
Everybody knows the museum should be on the high ground, at the top of the slope. But this museum doesn’t know; even before it’s a building, even when the museum is only a vague idea of a museum, it can’t stay where it should, on flat level land, it starts to slip.

Mur Island, Graz, Austria
Date built: 2003

photo : Elvira Klamminger
Mur Island Graz
A twist in the river, a node in the river, a circulation-route in the middle of the river. The circulation-route is an island; the island is a dome that morphs into a bowl that morphs into a dome.

Schachter Gallery, New York City, NY, USA
Date built: 2003

picture from architect practice
Manhattan building
A gallery as part of the gallery-dealer’s home. The gallery is meant to have a short existence, probably no more than three or four years. There’s a necessity for walls, to separate gallery from home, public from private.

United Bamboo Store, Tokyo, Japan
Date built: 2003

picture from architects firm
Japanese Shop
An old building re-clothed. The exterior of the building is given a second skin: a screen of stainless-steel mesh that encloses the balcony and re-shapes the building; the framework crosses the mesh in diagonals, radiating from some unknown point and traveling around the building, re-orienting the building.