Li Hei Di: the year of mud

Pace will present the year of mud, an exhibition of new paintings by London-based artist Li Hei Di, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery from November 6 through December 19. Marking the artist’s first solo exhibition with Pace in New York since they joined the gallery’s program in 2024, the year of mud will situate Li’s oneiric, effervescent compositions in a mediated viewing environment.

Existing between figuration and abstraction, Li’s paintings inhabit a space where certainty begins to dissolve. Li understands life as an ongoing act of transformation—an unending negotiation between interior experience and external reality. Their figures are never fixed, continually shifting between states of becoming and allowing the body to function less as a stable form than as a vessel through which memory, emotion, and desire flow. The compositions, rendered in a rich and almost shimmering palette, reveal themselves gradually as forms surface, recede, and transform.