Scavenge and Salvage: Louise Nevelson’s Shadow Dance at Pace Gallery, New York

Installation view: Shadow Dance, 2024. All images courtesy of Pace Gallery.

By AIDAN CHISHOLM February 18, 2025

In Shadow Dance, Louise Nevelson’s kaleidoscopic arrangements of found wooden remnants are literally in the shadows. In the subtly dimmed, grey-walled space of Pace in Chelsea, the exhibition brings together her now iconic monochromatic assemblages, each itself a “shadow dance.” Curated by Arne Glimcher, the founder of the gallery and a longtime friend of Nevelson (1899–1988), Shadow Dance affords the opportunity to view the Kyiv-born artist’s sculptural arrangements together in a constellation alongside her rarely exhibited, smaller scale mixed-media collages. 

Technically speaking, each arrangement of found wooden remnants is uniform in color—all black or white—yet as I stand before Moonlight Series IV (1986), the intricate sculpture seemingly contains myriad shades of black. The monochrome coloring does not flatten, but rather accentuates the elaborate dimensionality of the jam-packed assemblage, inviting attunement to the more subtle material particularities of the cast-off, here revivified, wooden components. 

The exhibition title evokes the function of shadows as integral to the work, as a characteristic facet of Nevelson’s sculptural idiom. Yet “shadow” is perhaps not solely a formal property, given the double-entendre with the artist’s commitment to scavenging neglected architectural remnants, often from New York City sidewalks—from the margins or “shadows,” if you will. Throughout her decades-long career, Nevelson continued this practice of recuperating wooden debris, a resourceful approach born in part out of necessity due to material shortages during World War II. This scrappy process brings to mind Nevelson’s positionality as an immigrant and a woman within the male-dominated art world in which she received limited mainstream recognition only in her sixties. As Julia Bryan-Wilson, who recently published the first monograph on the artist, explains, “Nevelson’s status as an eccentric, older, unmarried, independent woman collides with her use of the found object and her attachment to black paint.” (1)

Installation view: Shadow Dance, 2024.

Spindled balustrades, tapered chair legs, and ornamental flourishes among miscellaneous scraps are subsumed within these monumental assemblages, which reach from the wall into the space of viewers. Nevelson renders the familiar unfamiliar through the incorporation of architectural elements like the sideways door in Mirror Shadow XXXXII (1987), here stripped of functionality, though nonetheless a repository of untold material histories. In Artillery Landscape (ca. 1985), the title alludes to the former function of the nine assorted chests as weaponry containers, likely from the Vietnam War, an association resonant with the dark palette. 

The eponymous Shadow Dance (1986-87) is characteristic of her later works that abandon the rectilinear frame, exceeding the flatness of the wall. With linear remnants positioned diagonally, the angled wheel-like forms evoke a dynamic quality, a mechanic intensity in all black. Upon closer look, though, the pronounced organic undulation of a fragment reminiscent of driftwood undercuts more industrial associations as a reminder of the material’s earthly origins. Although Nevelson incorporated only previously processed wooden elements, the pronounced woodgrain of certain components is a reminder that all of the found objects once lived as trees. 

There is Nevelson’s own “shadow dance” with her materials, and then there is the “shadow dance” that is inhabiting the space of these assemblages that staunchly resist photographic capture in their monotone glory. Each arrangement seemingly evolves with each step as the shadows shift, movement rendering apparent the interplay across the distinct constructions. Despite the architectural scale of Mirror-Shadow VII (1985), I am drawn in close by the concentric organization of boxes against a grid, each a sort of abstract diorama that eschews sentimental associations through the incongruous odds and ends. On the opposite wall, on the back of two grey walls partitioning the expansive space, Nevelson’s framed mixed-media collages integrating cardboard, fabric scraps, and exposed wood panels further reflect her deep appreciation for unwanted, commonplace materials, a praxis that takes on political weight as a form of recuperation that negates distinctions between art and life. 

In bringing together a multitude of her assemblages, in conjunction with these collages, the exhibition evidences Nevelson’s signature style, while reflecting the depth and breadth of her work too often dismissed as repetitive or redundant—criticism that has thankfully waned in recent years with increasing attention to her oeuvre. From the mismatched, keepsake-sized remnants in Moonlight Series IV (1986) to the repeated, imposing linear units in City-Reflection (1972), Shadow Dance lends appreciation of Nevelson’s commitment to rummaging and rearranging not as a procedure of creative restraint, but rather as a radical framework of endless permutative possibility. WM

Note

1. Bryan-Wilson, Julia. “DRAG.” In Louise Nevelson’s Sculpture: DRAG, COLOR, JOIN, FACE, 20. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2023.