Image: Pace Gallery, New York
Pace will present ‘Seeing in Blue,’ an exhibition of new paintings by Torkwase Dyson, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery from September 11 through October 24.
The exhibition is inspired by Dyson’s expeditions and sensory experiences as a deep-sea diver, and considers distance, light, perception, symbiosis, and planetary transformation. The new cycle of paintings is informed by more than ten years of Dyson’s swimming and diving across the globe.
The works draw on haptic memories, diagrammatic drawings, engineering notes, photo-journal entries, and process poems that Dyson made during these explorations. The exhibition connects her interests in ecology, Black geography, and built environments to oceanic infrastructure, while presenting water as both ancestral knowledge and a force in global politics.
Dyson begins the painting process on the floor, priming canvases with translucent atmospheric washes that pool and layer before developing detailed geometric constructions through drawing, shaped wooden panels, strings, and hardware fixtures. ‘Seeing in Blue’ marks a shift from the darker palette that typically characterized Dyson’s earlier work toward aquatic tones.
In ‘Interbeing Blue’ (2026), titanium white makes the prominent blue hues almost incandescent, while flickers of dark green and passages of rust-red counter and animate the composition. Dyson considers paintings such as this to be apertures that enable viewers to experience not what she sees but how she sees.
