Halsey McKay is pleased to present GHSTBKSX, Ann Pibal’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. Pibal’s current body of work features rich, velvety fields of color alongside reflective, sparkling, and metallic surfaces. These depictions of reflection operate in dialogue with established themes in her practice, including diagrammatic representations of the book, frame, stage, curtain, and mirror, while introducing a new openness to allusions of watery, spatial environments.
The use of iridescent paint introduces a sensual dimension that directly engages the exhibition space. These surfaces reflect both the gallery’s ambient light and the movement of viewers, producing shifting color relationships and evolving visual narratives across the panels. The interplay between velvety passages and dynamically glittering textures creates a striking contrast with Pibal’s lush, painterly gestures, unfolding within deep, immersive spatial fields.
Across the exhibition, the works engage with reflection and repetition, extending their inquiry into temporality. The ostensibly neutral rectangle becomes a vehicle for evoking the fleeting and transitory qualities of light, while mirrored surfaces underscore the instability and mutability of perception itself.
Pibal’s work has been recognized with awards from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Tiffany & Co. Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Alex Katz Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Rappaport Foundation, among others.Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally since her first solo exhibition in New York in 2004. Selected venues include Team Gallery, Lucien Terras Gallery, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Feature Inc., Max Protetch Gallery, Meulensteen Gallery, and Paula Cooper Gallery in New York; Team Bungalow in Los Angeles; Rhona Hoffman Gallery and The Suburban in Chicago; Slewe Gallery in Amsterdam; Petra Rinck Galerie in Düsseldorf; de Pury & Luxembourg in Zurich; and Pifo Gallery in Beijing.
Pibal has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Greater New York and The Painted World at MoMA PS1; That Place and Unfolding Tales at the Brooklyn Museum; Background Image at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; From Beyond the Window at the University of Minnesota; Reductive Minimalism: Women Artists in Dialogue at the University of Michigan; Sightlines at American University; Now-Ism: Abstraction Today at the Pizzuti Collection The Jewel Thief at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery; the deCordova Biennial and Expanding Abstraction at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum; and A Short History of Abstraction at Rønnebæksholm in Copenhagen.
Her work is held in public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, among others.
