At a glance
Take the stairs and meet David Byrne’s peculiar cast of building-headed families, dancing shapes and slightly unsettling strangers.
Why go
This is not a conventional gallery exhibition. Byrne has drawn nine life-size figures directly onto the walls of Pace’s stairwell, transforming a transitional part of the building into a sequence of unexpected encounters.
The installation captures the same intelligent absurdity found throughout Byrne’s music, theatre and visual work.
Best for
- David Byrne and Talking Heads admirers
- Visitors interested in drawing and illustration
You'll see
Nine wall drawings created over several days in April 2025 and distributed across the stairwell landings between the first and seventh floors. Byrne enlarged his figures to approximately human scale so that visitors meet them face-to-face rather than viewing them as small illustrations.
Pace of visit
This is a light, accessible installation rather than a dense exhibition. It can be seen in around 15 minutes, although reaching every drawing requires climbing between the first and seventh floors.
Artlovers Tip
Use the stairs from the first floor upwards rather than taking the lift to the top and descending. The gradual climb gives the installation a loose narrative rhythm, with each landing functioning like a new page in a vertical sketchbook.
Inside the exhibition
Meet the artist
Description
Byrne’s drawings occupy a part of the gallery normally treated as purely functional. Instead of creating a separate white-cube presentation, Pace allows the work to interrupt the ordinary movement of visitors between exhibitions.
This setting changes the relationship between image and viewer. The figures cannot be observed comfortably from a great distance; they appear suddenly at landings, close to eye level and roughly equivalent to a human body. Passing them feels less like inspecting drawings and more like meeting a succession of improbable strangers.
The installation also preserves the physical directness of its making. Byrne worked from projected preparatory sketches and traced the images onto the walls with acrylic marker. Their clean lines and apparently casual humour disguise careful decisions about scale, placement and the viewer’s movement.
David Byrne was born in Dumbarton, Scotland, in 1952, David Byrne studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Maryland Institute College of Art before becoming internationally known as the co-founder and frontman of Talking Heads.
Byrne’s drawings frequently turn bodies, furniture, diagrams and fragments of language into visual jokes about contemporary life. Influenced by Saul Steinberg, he uses humour to cross the boundaries between illustration and fine art, expressing ideas that may work more effectively as images than as songs.
Experience as an Artlover
The exhibition is located at Pace Gallery's 540 West 25th Street location in Manhattan. While admission is free, check the gallery's website for seasonal hours and potential holiday closures.
David Byrne
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