Opener 23 Pam Lins: Denver Gold

Brooklyn-based artist Pam Lins explores the psychological and aesthetic potential of objects and images. While Lins refers to her work primarily as sculpture, she consistently questions traditional notions of the medium through its relationship to other forms of representation, most notably photography and painting. Mixing a love of formal, modernist art with a madcap, idiosyncratic sensibility, Lins’s work interrogates both itself and its engagement with architecture and viewers.

For her Tang exhibition, Lins will transform the museum’s mezzanine into a single environment that combines previous and re-made works with new pieces on view for the first time. Her recent sculptures blur seeming opposites, such as craft and fine art, abstract and representative, slapdash and minimalist, colorful and unadorned, and hollow and full. For her 2010 solo exhibition at New York’s Rachel Uffner Gallery, Lins presented a forest of six large plywood pedestals topped with small paintings, several rendered from photographs of well-known sculptures. Allusions to the relationships between sculpture, photography, and painting re-emerged in Lins’s recreation of a section of the early twentieth-century sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s studio. Brancusi used a monochromatic painting as a backdrop when photographing his sculptures, which Lins re-created from a photograph of his studio.

Born in Chicago, Pam Lins received her BA from the State University of Minnesota and MFA from Hunter College. Her work has been featured in exhibitions in the US, Europe and Canada, including exhibitions at the New York-based venues Artists Space, White Columns, Socrates Sculpture Park, Brooklyn Art Museum, Sculpture Center, Momenta Art, and Art in General. She currently teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art and Princeton University.