"Calor Universal" at Pace Gallery

Baby's first show

It’s been a while, but I return with some personal news: I started a full-time role at Pace Gallery and had the pleasure of assisting on Calor Universal, on view at Pace Gallery East Hampton and FDP from July 2—14. Come visit if you’re in the area!

Patricia Leite, Fogueira, 2018

Calor Universal brings together a cross-generational group of artists from within and outside Pace’s program, including modernist masters and contemporary figures building new styles and visual vocabularies.

The exhibition, curated by Germano Dushá in collaboration with Mendes Woods and FDP, features a robust selection of works across different mediums and styles. Works in Calor Universal examine themes of transcendence and transmutation through artistic expression. Including both figurative and abstract works, the exhibition explores the concept of “calor,” understood as sublimation, as a vehicle for transforming material states. Together, the artworks speak to nature’s complex dynamics.

Figuring in the exhibition is Tarsila do Amaral’s Bicho Antropofágico I (1929), one of the artist’s earliest explorations of the Anthropophagic movement, which imagined a specifically Brazilian culture arising from the symbolic digestion—or artistic “cannibalism”—of outside influences. do Amaral’s figures, hybrid in nature, represent a metabolization of aesthetics. Other works in the exhibition, including Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro’s Take me, make me yours. I need you (2022), show the labyrinthian relationships between the Anthropophagic movement and groundbreaking ways that contemporary artists in Latin America are working to make visible mystic and intangible connections to the natural world.

As the exhibition’s title implies, the works in the presentation are united by a calor universal, an energy flux that percolates in the landscapes, bodies, subjectivities, archetypes, and symbols on view. Calor Universal represents a hot cosmogony, a metaphysics of matter in movement, and a topography of elements. The works on view present a constellation of ideas that defy rigid categorization or definition. Instead, the exhibition points to a vigorous manifestation of the spirit—a language of unnamable forms that become guideposts for artists and viewers alike.

Marina Perez Simão, Untitled, 2022