Image: Pace Prints, New York
The exhibition consists of new monotype silkscreens that reimagine K2’s summit in five distinct iterations.
Created in collaboration with Brand X Editions, the works explore the threshold between terrain and atmosphere, shifting between monumental representation and abstraction. Located in the Karakoram range along the Pakistan-China border, K2 is the world’s second-highest mountain and one of its most formidable peaks.
Characteristic of Kagan’s practice, each image is immediately legible from a distance yet increasingly abstract at close range: K2 appears monumental, heroic in scale, before dissolving into a kinetic collision of marks, fractured textures, and dense passages of cobalt.
The mountain remains fixed in form while its surface is continually reconfigured—solid and unstable, recognizable and painterly alike. As K2 rises through each composition, shifts in texture and color destabilize its surface, extending Kagan’s ongoing interest in scale and subjects that test the limits of human experience.
Michael Kagan holds a BA from George Washington University and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art, where he completed an additional postgraduate fellowship in 2006.
