Anicka Yi, the Korean-born New York-based conceptual artist known for her multisensory works, has joined Pace Gallery’s roster of artists. She will also continue to be represented by Gladstone Gallery, 47 Canal, and Esther Schipper. Her first solo exhibition with the gallery will take place in New York in 2027. In the meantime, she will debut a new painting in Pace’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong later this month.
Yi has many projects currently on view or in the pipeline. This spring, her work will be included in the New Museum’s forthcoming group show, “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” which opens on March 21st and will christen the museum’s newly-expanded space. She will also unveil her first large-scale outdoor work on May 17th at Storm King Art Center in New York, which will create a microbiological portrait using water and soil samples sourced from the sculpture park’s pond.
“Anicka is one of the most innovative artists of our time,” said Samanthe Rubell, Pace’s president, in a press statement. “Combining materials from the natural world with cutting-edge processes and technologies, her works are extraordinary, uncanny worlds unto themselves. Grappling with relevant political and ecological questions of the present moment, her experimental practice is part of a long lineage of artists—including Robert Irwin and James Turrell—who expanded the phenomenological possibilities of art making.”
Yi is known for her biologically-forward, technologically-curious works of art that fuse rigorous research and unconventional methods and materials, including snail slime, hair gel, and potato chips. She has deep-fried flowers, created fragrances from human sweat, and shaped kelp into lighting sculptures that resemble internal organs or insect cocoons.
Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1971, Yi moved with her family to the United States when she was two years old and grew up in Southern California. She studied at the University of California in Los Angeles and Hunter College in New York before beginning her career in the fashion industry. She turned towards art in her thirties without any formal training, and made her first artwork in 2008 with a collective called Circular File.
Her first major institutional solo presentation was held at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2014, followed by solo shows at The Kitchen in New York and the Kunsthalle Basel. In 2016 she was awarded the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize, which was accompanied by a solo show with the museum in 2017. And in 2021, she was chosen for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall Hyundai Commission, in which she transformed the gargantuan space into an ecosystem of alien-looking sculptures powered by drones and algorithms that emitted scents.
She has also participated in the 2019 Venice Biennale and the 2017 Whitney Biennial, among other prestigious group shows, and her work is held in major collections including The Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pinault Collection in Paris and Venice, and the Rubell Museum in Miami and Washington, D.C..
