Pacita Abad: Door to Life: Tina Kim Gallery, New York

"The trip to Yemen was a dream...every day a new idea, every day a new door"

– Pacita Abad, Foreword to "Door to Life," 1999

Tina Kim Gallery is presenting Door to Life, its third solo exhibition of works by the visionary artist Pacita Abad (1946–2004) which highlights a series of works the artist made after a trip to Yemen in the spring of 1998.

For years after, Abad created artworks across scale and media that drew tremendous inspiration from the architecture and decorative arts across the country. Including the debut of the artist’s never-before-seen qamariya paintings — references to the traditional stained glass windows of Sanaa.

The exhibition includes a number of Abad’s intimately-scaled square Door to Life paintings, as well as larger paintings, which the artist made in her signature trapunto style.

Significant works from Abad’s Door Made of Straw series—which were previously exhibited at the 13th Gwangju Biennale: Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning in Gwangju, Korea (2021) —will make their North American debut.

In these works Abad rejects the traditional surfaces of canvas or paper, instead choosing to paint onto woven straw mats like those she saw woven by Yemeni women in Hodeidah. She then layered and stitched her artwork with patterned batik and ikat textiles, sourced in Indonesia.

The weave of the mats provides a structured grid that echoes the architectural forms in the paintings, but the geometries of the work retain a fluidity and tactility indebted to their hand-crafted nature and their roots in practices that precede twentieth-century aesthetic movements.