Pace Gallery’s Pace Live platform announces the premiere of a new performance and installation by the artist Miles Greenberg, accompanying the opening of Hermann Nitsch: Selected Paintings, Actions, Relics, and Musical Scores, 1965–2020, a presentation of Nitsch’s paintings, photographs, relics, and musical scores on view at the gallery through April 29, 2023.
Greenberg’s performances on March 17, 18, 24, and 25 will complement and speak to Nitsch’s oeuvre, and Greenberg’s presentation, titled Fountain II, will situate Nitsch’s experimental practice within a contemporary context. This will be Pace’s first show—and the first planned posthumous exhibition—dedicated to Nitsch, a founder of the Viennese Actionism movement who died last year at age 83. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery’s 510 West 25th Street location in New York.
On the occasion of the exhibition, Pace Live—the gallery’s interdisciplinary platform for commissioning and presenting new live art performances, musical acts, and other events—will premiere Fountain II, a new durational performance and installation by Miles Greenberg. On view and performed alongside Nitsch’s work during the first weeks of the exhibition’s run, Fountain II expands upon Greenberg’s initial performance from 2021, Fountain I, which was heavily inspired by the late Viennese actionist painter and resulted in sculptures that were presented in a two- person exhibition at the New Museum in New York during the fall of 2022. Greenberg has nurtured a practice that spans performance and sculpture, activating his large-scale, immersive, and site-specific environments with durational, poetic productions. A protégé of Marina Abramović, who participated in Nitsch’s 50th action in 1975, Greenberg has been deeply influenced by Nitsch, and he attended the performance of the 6-Day-Play at Prinzendorf Castle last summer.
In Fountain II, two performers will stand atop a plinth surrounded by a pool of blood-red water. The performers will engage in a sustained and choreographed embrace over the course of 6 hours, with dyed water hemorrhaging from their bodies onto the plinth and into pool below. The work serves as a poem about the final stages of heartbreak—when one turns their entire body inside out to reach a sort of ecstasy. The visceral, poetic, and graphic work transcends gore, existing in the space of the surreal. Four performances of Fountain II will be held at Pace, with Greenberg figuring in a selection of these presentations. The durational performance will be set against a backdrop of Nitsch’s paintings, conjuring new connections between contemporary and 20th-century performance. The gallery’s staging of Fountain II as part of its Nitsch exhibition continues its enduring interest in and support of experimental performance, both contemporary and historical.
Pace Gallery | 510 West 25th Street, New York
Installation on view March 17-March 25, 2023 | Performances on March 17, 18, 24, & 25, 2023
Exhibition on view March 17-April 29, 2023
