REVIEW: Nathalie Du Pasquier, Pace Gallery review ★★★★★

Presenting a collection of Nathalie du Pasquier's works created between 2008-2014, From time to time explores the artist's longstanding interest in representation, colour and assemblage. A founding member of the post-modernist design and architecture collective Memphis Group, established in Milan in the early 1980s, du Pasquier is recognised today as much for her painting and drawing as for her furniture designs.

This exhibition, her first retrospective in the UK, forefronts the artist's two dimensional works. Originally celebrated for her work with textiles, plastic laminates, and decorated surfaces, du Pasquier has since become known for her architectural paintings — a practice to which she has dedicated herself since 1987.

For the past 40 years du Pasquier has playfully blurred the lines between fine art and design. The vividly-coloured asymmetric shapes that characterise both the designs and surface decoration of Memphis furniture resonate in the paintings on display. Her landscapes of the late 1980s and early 1990s have evolved into still lives of carefully arranged objects, while her later, more abstract compositions of dissociated surfaces explore complex arrangements of form that play with ideas of fiction and reality.

Du Pasquier's block coloured paintings at Pace Gallery challenge the concept of representation. In almost every work, perspective is distorted through the intersection of vertical and curvilinear lines or diagonal planes. The centrepiece of the exhibition, in the site-specific red room, is the oil on canvas painted in 2014, in which she plays with depth and perspective through shadow. The undefined light source shining bright on the thick impasto black lines casts shadows within the composition that makes the two dimensional look three dimensional, transforming a plane into a space.



Nathalie du Pasquier, 2014, oil on canvas

Du Pasquier's paintings hang proud on the lofty, whitewashed walls, and her pastel-coloured wooden maquettes stand strong on block-coloured podiums dotted around the spacious room. The intersection of different mediums breaks the monotony of du Pasquier's rhythmic painterly style, and is a curatorial masterstroke. But while her work is compositionally intriguing, it is a little repetitive.

Unless you are a self-proclaimed architectural buff — and if you are, the architectural drawings gallery in this year's Summer Exhibition is a must-see — it's not convincingly captivating for a lengthy perusal. Once you have seen one composition of intersecting asymmetrical shapes, you have seen them all.

It's worth dropping by Pace Gallery, but a quick whiz round for non-architecture aficionados will suffice.