Pace presents Monument to the Unimportant, a group exhibition bringing together sculptures, paintings, works on paper, and installation that each take the everyday object as a point of departure, revealing art’s enduring ability to transform the overlooked into sites of inquiry and visions of delight.

Monument to the Unimportant includes works by Henni Alftan, Genesis Belanger, Keith Coventry, Elmgreen & Dragset, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Urs Fischer, Sylvie Fleury, Robert Gober, Konrad Klapheck, Jac Leirner, Tony Matelli, Claes Oldenburg, Wayne Thiebaud, Rachel Whiteread, Erwin Wurm, and B. Wurtz.

Often directly mimetic, these works upturn visual hierarchies in fine art and propose that the mundane can be harnessed to monumental effect. Spanning over 60 years of making, they share common subjects: cakes abound in the work of Oldenburg and Thiebaud; the architecture of the home inspires Wurm and Belanger’s sculptures; and both Klapheck and Hockney illuminate the infrastructure—the cabling and piping—of daily life. These resonances suggest that, while what we choose to celebrate differs across cultures and times, the unimportant almost always relates to the domestic, the alimentary, and the excretory.

The artists in this exhibition elevate their subjects from the invisibility of everyday life using a variety of contextual, material, and formal devices. These range from alchemical transformations, such as Matelli’s delicately painted bronze weeds, to compositional rearrangements of size, scale, crop, juxtaposition, and repetition, like in Thiebaud’s Various Cakes (1981). Closely framed and sumptuously lit, this painting depicts five rows of pastel-hued iced desserts and illuminates the energy and abundance of consumer choice in twentieth-century America. Also on view are Oldenburg’s N.Y.C. Pretzel (1994) and Profiterole (1989–90), both editions of multiple works. Like Thiebaud’s cakes, they are replications of foodstuffs, yet here their multiplicity toys with the tension between mass production and artistic originality.

Many of the works in the exhibition refer to objects or spaces that exist only for, or because of, the human body. Bereft of their users, the artworks themselves become stand-ins for the figure. In Belanger’s sculptures, domestic objects often morph into bodily surrogates that suggest presence through absence. The two urinals that form Elmgreen & Dragset’s sculpture Gay Marriage (2010) stand side-by-side, their ultra-realistic rendering disturbed only by the surreal and tender tangling of their shared, closed loop pipes. Whiteread’s 1993 Untitled (Plaster Torso), however, implicates the body as a vulnerable and isolated site. An interior cast of an overfilled hot water bottle, this sculpture’s plaster surface, which, in its making, has been scratched and pockmarked, bears a remarkable affinity with the porosity of skin.

The slippery nature of meaning inflects Monument to the Unimportant. In some works, the ambiguity of perspective makes explicit our lack of control over what, and how, we see. B. Wurtz’s Untitled (Steamer) and Untitled (Silver Lampshade), both 1987, consist of large, monochromatic photographs that tower above their eponymous domestic items. Without the objects below, these foreshortened and cropped images might instead be read as the silver hulls of an advanced space-age machine.

A similar tension animates Urs Fischer’s Mr. E & Spotzy (2012), a sculpture composed of two mirror-polished steel boxes, each screen-printed with high-resolution images of an ironing board and iron. The images appear to hover within their reflective shells as the surrounding world mirrors across the chrome surface. Here, the familiar tools of domestic labor merge with the language of high technology and the cool precision of Minimalist form. The result is a complete disorientation of perspective in which function is flattened, surface promises depth, and in the act of looking, we encounter ourselves reflected back.