Pace Gallery

A pioneering figure in video and performance art, Joan Jonas has spent over five decades shaping the contours of contemporary practice. Born in New York in 1936 and trained as a sculptor, she emerged in the 1960s amid the city’s avant-garde scene, where artists, dancers and musicians collaborated to redefine creative boundaries. Her multidisciplinary approach spans installation, drawing and video, and has often been inspired by mythology, nature and Japanese theatre traditions. Until June 28, Pace Tokyo is hosting ‘Joan Jonas: Drawings, Curated by Adam Pendleton’, the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Curated by one of Jonas’s long-time friends and peers, the show highlights the centrality of drawing in her work and her deep artistic relationship with Japan. It brings together around 80 works on paper, spanning from the 1970s to the 2010s, including delicate rabbit drawings referencing the Japanese moon myth, gestural ‘body drawings’ on traditional Japanese paper, and intricate studies of fish and birds.

Pace Tokyo is hosting the first solo exhibition in Japan by acclaimed American artist Tara Donovan until July 3. A pivotal figure in contemporary art, Donovan is celebrated for her transformative use of everyday materials – plastic cups, straws, Slinkys, pins and CDs – into sculptural and perceptual experiences that defy categorisation. Rooted in the traditions of Postminimalism and the Light and Space movement, her work has earned her a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant and a place in major museum collections around the world. Donovan’s Tokyo show surveys two decades of her boundary-pushing practice. Highlights include ‘Haze’ (2003), a mesmerising wall installation composed of drinking straws, and ‘Stratagem IX’ (2024), an eight-foot sculpture crafted from recycled CD-ROM discs that refract light in dazzling, ever-changing patterns. Also featured are recent wall-based works using reconfigured Slinkys and a new pin drawing created specifically for this display.