Torkwase Dyson

Seeing in Blue

On View
Sep 11 – Oct 24, 2026
New York

Installation view of Seeing in Blue by Torkwase Dysoni — 6/8

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. Offering personal reflections on what the artist calls the “boundless state change of water,” the works on view strive toward the mindful presence needed to witness its beauty and devastation.

Seeing in Blue spotlights a new series of paintings inspired by Dyson’s expeditions and sensory experiences as a deep-sea diver, exploring questions of distance, light, perception, symbiosis, and planetary transformation. The distilled works are informed by a culmination of haptic memories, diagrammatic drawings, engineering notes, photo journal entries, and process poems written by the artist during these explorations. Dyson brings her ongoing interest in the transhistorical implications of ecology, black geography, and built environments to an intimate scale, offering detailed expressions from her embodied research practices of oceanic infrastructure. Water is a central force of ancestral knowledge and global politics for the artist, and she offers a poetic look into the liminal space between its atmospheric phenomena and the complex infrastructures humanity has built that traverse above and below sea level.

Dyson begins her painting process on the floor, priming the canvas with atmospheric washes of translucent colors that pool and layer in accordance with their inherent “discursive harmony.” From there, she moves toward detailed geometric constructions, building her signature curvilinear forms both in gestures of drawing and in shaped wooden panels (sanded and painted over as she navigates the composition), strings, and hardware fixtures. The quiet tension that arises between the two modes of mark-making—images that emerge by chance and by delicate construction—gives depth and luminosity to space. The canvas edges, often telling of this layered process, are considered just as live as the other compositional and material elements of her paintings.

Whereas a darker palette typically prevails in Dyson’s past works—producing a stark contrast between the colorful bleeds across the edge and the painting’s reductive, meditative front—aquatic tones come to the fore in Seeing in Blue. In Interbeing Blue (2026), the mixture of titanium white renders the painting’s prominent blue hues almost incandescent, which are then countervailed and animated by flickers of dark green and passages of rust-red. As much as these paintings evoke a real sense of vision and sights underwater, Dyson considers them apertures that enable us to experience not what she sees but how she sees.

Dyson’s new cycle of paintings is informed by more than ten years of swimming and diving across the globe and foregrounds a desire to bring her “witnessing” as a diver to bear on the medium of painting. Although water is completely colorless, it mediates phenomena and contains embodied perception. The sensory experiences of its pressure and buoyancy are closely linked to our own breath, density, and navigational movements. For the artist, the awe commanded by this “beauty of the below” is deeply physical, political, and infrastructural: over time, man-made objects, seafloor drill factories, artificial reefs, military posts, and acoustic surveillance—alongside the destruction of the built world—meld into the ocean’s natural spheres. What is evoked here is not a simple “vacation beautiful” aesthetic, but a sense of beauty that feels prehistoric, consequential, terrifying, and vulnerable all at once.

In her animation debut for the 2026 Carnegie International, Tomorrow was Yesterday, the unique screening structure of a planetarium dome allows Dyson to deliberately position her viewers on the seabed, looking up toward majestic and troubled waters. This very superposition also reminds us, as we navigate her paintings in Seeing in Blue, that the oceanic torrents might also be a cosmic storm.

Dyson’s work remains on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, through January 3, 2027. Tougaloo (2026)—her large-scale multimedia installation created for In Minor Keys, the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia—is on view in the Arsenale through November 22, 2026. Dyson will have solo exhibitions at The Joan and Martin Goldfarb Gallery of York University in Toronto from September 10, 2026, through March 20, 2027, and at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Bregenz, Austria, from October 17, 2026, through January 24, 2027. Her work will also feature in the group exhibition Hard Art at MoMA PS1 in New York, opening November 5, 2026.

Films

Seeing in Blue: In the Studio with Torkwase Dyson

Torkwase Dyson opens a window onto the process of creating her new body of paintings in her Beacon, New York, studio. Beginning on the floor with atmospheric washes of color, she then moves toward detailed geometric constructions. At the heart of these paintings—which are inspired by Dyson's expeditions and sensory experiences as a deep-sea diver—is what the artist calls the “boundless state change of water.” “Working with water as a material means that I’m working between physics and memory,” she says, “allowing it both to take its course errantly and then following its system.”

A Blue Tongue, A Blue Song by Torkwase Dyson

Blue Worlding for Love by Torkwase Dyson

The Distance Inside Us by Torkwase Dyson

Hand to Hand, Heart to Heart (Unknown of Us 1) by Torkwase Dyson

Hand to Hand, Heart to Heart (Unknown of Us 3) by Torkwase Dyson

To Plunge, To See, To Never, To Time, To Shadow, To Remember by Torkwase Dyson

Portrait of Torkwase Dyson — Photo: Hansi Liao

About the Artist

Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Examining the history and future of black spatial liberation strategies, Dyson’s abstract works grapple with the ways in which space is perceived and negotiated, particularly by black and brown bodies. The artist has distilled a vocabulary of poetic forms to address the spaciousness of freedom and question what type of climates are born out of world building.

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