Michael Kagan Surface to Air

Located in the Karakoram range along the Pakistan-China border, K2 is the world’s second-highest mountain and one of its most formidable peaks. Michael Kagan’s new monotype silkscreens, ‘Surface to Air’, reimagine the imposing summit, rendering five distinct iterations of K2’s apex, on view at Pace Prints Chelsea from October 15–November 14, 2026, at 536 West 22nd Street.

Created in collaboration with Brand X Editions, ‘Surface to Air’ takes its title from the threshold between terrain and atmosphere: the point at which the physical mass of the mountain meets the space surrounding it. As K2 rises through each composition, shifts in texture and color destabilize its surface, extending Kagan’s ongoing interest in scale and subjects that test the limits of human experience. Characteristic of Kagan’s practice, each image is immediately legible from a distance yet increasingly abstract at close range. K2 appears monumental, heroic in scale, before dissolving into a kinetic collision of marks, fractured textures, and dense passages of cobalt. The mountain remains fixed in form while its surface is continually reconfigured—solid and unstable, recognizable and painterly alike.