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STEPHEN PACE: EARLY WORK, ACME Fine Art’s second solo exhibition of Stephen Pace’s abstract expressionist works, will open on 20 March 2009. This exhibition will focus on watercolors and oil paintings that were created between 1950 to 1955. This was an important developmental period for Pace, one that traces his growth from student at the Hans Hofmann School to accomplished member of the New York School. A reception from six to eight on Friday evening (the 20th) will mark the opening. The exhibition will run through 8 May. Exhibition catalogues are available by contacting the gallery.

Although today he is widely recognized for his contemporary figurative paintings and watercolors, Stephen Pace made his name in the art world in the 1950s and early 1960s for his non-objective Abstract Expressionist canvases. During this period Pace found representation at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York, and Wise mounted five solo exhibitions of Pace’s work over the course of two decades. His work was also included in group exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art (four times) during this period.

Following military service in World War II, Pace came to New York and studied with the man who is widely recognized as one of the 20th century’s most important and influential art educators, Hans Hofmann. As a post-war student of Hofmann, Pace is today labeled a second generation Abstract Expressionist; however, throughout the 1950s during the heyday of the Abstract Expressionist movement, Pace’s contemporary work was exhibited along side the most respected of the first generation artists. Hans Hofmann had high regard for Pace, and in a LOOK magazine story from 1959 he described Pace as an “original talent.” In connection with an exhibition of paintings by Pace at the Walker Art Center in 1961 Hofmann said that Pace was a “great contemporary talent… with great plastic imagination and immense vitality and inventiveness in the realm of color.”

The focus of ACME Fine Art’s upcoming exhibition of Stephen Pace’s non-representational work will be the paintings produced between 1950 and 1955. The idea is to trace Pace’s exploration and development from the point of interface with maestro Hofmann through this highly productive five-year period, which culminated in the establishment of his mature, unique, expressionist voice. As it still can be seen today in his contemporary canvases, this work is at once lyrical, and poetic; however, these early paintings demonstrate a fearless vigor and bold masculinity that is uniquely both compelling and provocative.

Exhibition catalogues are available upon request.

For further information about this exhibition or other gallery events, please contact the gallery at 617.585.9551, or via e-mail at info@acmefineart.com.

ACME Fine Art and Design is located at 38 Newbury Street, Boston, Massachusetts, 02116. Gallery hours are 11:00 to 5:30 Tuesday through Saturday.

selection of works