05.03.19 — 05.25.19

Gina Pane: Traces is a show of out-of-print books, catalogs, and ephemera of Gina Pane’s art, interviews and writings. Gina Pane (PAH-neh) was born in 1939 in Biarritz, to an Italian father, and a German mother. She spent her childhood in Turin, and at age 21, she left Italy to attend the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she remained until 1963. During that time, she also worked at theAteliers de Peinture, lithographie et d’Art Sacré and lived in Paris until her premature death, after a long illness, in 1990.

Strongly influenced by Vincent van Gogh, Pane first began painting at age 16. In the 1970s, Pane was a part of the Art corporel (body art) movement in France. From 1978 to 1979, she oversaw an atelier dedicated to performance art at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She taught painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Le Mans from 1975 to 1989. In an interview she gave to Catherine Lawless in 1989, Pane talked about her Actions, “The bodily Actions were never conceived as ephemeral works, but as mural compositions created in three stages. Today, the connection is a simple one. My subject is always the body, and the absence of my body is replaced by that of another body, the body of saints and martyrs.” By 1981, Pane stopped making Actions and transitioned into what she called Partitions, which were wall installations made of metal, glass, wool, felt and photographs, using some of the early principles she used in her paintings and sculpture, referencing the body in its absence.

Her first Action in the U.S., “A Little Journey,” was performed at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, which Chris Burden organized for the group show Polar Crossing, in 1978. The last Action that Pane created, “Cocaina Fra Angelica,” was performed in 1981 at Franklin Furnace in New York with Pane directing, from Paris, the four female performers. The most recent solo show of her work was held in 1991 at the Curt Marcus Gallery in New York. In 2013, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston mounted a show called Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane curated by Dean Daderko; it traveled, in 2014, only to the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle. For one of our most significant body artists, why has there not been an in-depth museum show of her work in New York?

— Lisa Martin

Artist/Owner/Director