Paul Pfeiffer
Pasodoble
13 Oct - 19 Dec 2026

 

Private view: Monday 12 October, 6–8pm

 

Thomas Dane Gallery
3 Duke Street, St James’s, London SW1

 


Thomas Dane Gallery is delighted to premiere a new single screen video installation by Paul Pfeiffer: Pasodoble (2026). Filmed across three interconnected sites—a bull breeding farm outside Seville, an historic bullring in Bilbao, and a mobile broadcast van outside that bullring—the work traces the networks that sustain one of the world’s most enduring and contested public spectacles: bullfighting. Together, these three sites form an interconnected ecology in which labour, performance and mediation sustain “a regime of sensory immersion that orchestrates perception.”[1]  In Pasodoble, Pfeiffer turns his attention to the structures and practices that frame, circulate and perpetuate the ritual event of the corrida. The bullring emerges as a place where the visceral and the theatrical converge, a space in which gestures, audiences and architecture combine to produce a complexly orchestrated collective experience.

 

Working across these three sites, in a digressive and nonlinear form, Pfeiffer shifts his attention away from the climactic moments traditionally associated with the corrida. Instead, Pasodoble foregrounds the intricate and interdependent dynamics by which collective acts of witness and imaging, enfolded in intense sonic structures organised around violent acts, produce profound instances of feeling and complexly coded meanings. If, as Maya Deren wrote, “[a] ritual is an action distinguished from all others in that it seeks the realization of its purpose through the exercise of form,” and therefore “[i]n ritual, the form is the meaning,”[2] then Pfeiffer’s Pasodoble disaggregates and reassesses the elaboration of this ritual form across the varying sites and practices that sustain bullfighting’s choreography of life and death.

 

Throughout his practice, Pfeiffer has explored the cultural power of spectacle, and the ways in which images reorganise desire, belief and memory as core elements within elaborate technologies of mediation and representation that act on our collective consciousness. Within that framework, sound, language, and mimicry—whether in the form of the speech choir (Live from Neverland, 2006), a pop song (Incarnator, 2019), or military music (The Saints, 2008)—have served as significant aesthetic materials in Pfeiffer’s examination of the historical movements of meaning through the imperial and diasporic circuits of culture. This new work extends those longstanding concerns, and resonates with earlier works like Red Green Blue (2022–23), Three Figures in a Room (2015), and The Saints (2008) by approaching mass public rituals, and their corollary architectures and techniques, as a lens through which broader questions of spectatorship, power and collective feeling can be richly considered through their historical evolution and their aesthetic forms.

 

Paul Pfeiffer (b. Honolulu, Hawai’i, 1966) lives and works in New York. He has received numerous awards and fellowships including a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship and the Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum. He has exhibited internationally, with selected solo exhibitions including: Vitruvian Figure (Juventus), Pista 500, Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin, Italy (2025); Paul Pfeiffer: Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles CA (2023; travelling to Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, 2024, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago IL, 2025); Vitruvian Experiments, Inhotim Institute, Brumadinho, Brazil (2018); Incarnator, Bellas Artes Outpost, Manila, Philippines (2018); Screen Series, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago IL (2017); Caryatids, Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawai’i HI (2016); Vitruvian Figure, Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Malate Manila, Philippines (2015); Paul Pfeiffer, Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany (2011); In the Zone, Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo NY (2010); The Saints, Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009); Monologue, MUSAC León, Léon, Spain (2008); and Whitney Museum of American Art (2001). His work is held in international collections including LACMA, Los Angeles CA; Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago IL; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham NC; Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; Broad Contemporary Art Museum, Santa Monica CA; Hirshhorn Museum; Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany; Pinault Collection, Paris, France; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy; and MoMA, New York NY. 

 

For exhibitions and sales enquiries please contact Olivia Rawnsley: olivia@thomasdanegallery.com

 

For press enquiries please contact Patrick Shier: patrick@thomasdanegallery.com

 

 

 

Paul Pfeiffer, Pasodoble, 2026 (still) © Paul Pfeiffer. 

 

 

 

[1] Paul Pfeiffer, August 2026

[2] Maya Deren, program note on Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), in Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film [Kingston: Documentext, 2005] p. 252