LYNDA BENGLIS: KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING

Elephant Necklace Circle, 2016

Pace has presented KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING, an exhibition of sculptures by Lynda Benglis.

September 11 – October 24, 2026

Since the late 1960s, Benglis has developed her lively, flowing forms across a wide range of materials—from beeswax, latex, and polyurethane foam to later innovations with plaster, gold, vaporized metals, glass, ceramics, and paper. Emerging amid the rise of Postminimalism, she set herself apart from her contemporaries with an enthusiastic embrace of vivid color and sensuous, organic surfaces.

KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING features a robust range of sculptures created by Benglis over more than five decades, illuminating her use of diverse methods and materials. The earliest work in the show is Sparkle Knot IV (1972), a knotted tube of wire mesh covered in plaster, paints, and sparkles. Sparkle Knot IV signals the initiation of processes that Benglis would go on to transform and develop across further series also on view in Pace’s presentation, from the vibrant gold-leafed and metallized pleats and glass works of the 1980s, to the painterly, extruded and folded ceramics of the 2010s, all the way to her more recent Elephant Necklace and paper works, where knotting gives way to open, expansive forms.

Elephant: First Foot Forward, 2018

Other free-standing sculptures in the exhibition include large-scale, reflective bronze works from recent years, in which rounded organic shapes seem to undulate and shift as viewers move around them, as well as small ceramic works from the 2010s, with Benglis’s signature folds, loops, and cascades embellished with expressionistic swathes of glaze. “The ceramics, for me,” Benglis said, “were about how to make gestures, an architecture of gestures, and how to make a painting physically—how to present it so that they're coming together and you have a kind of explosion or implosion of forms.”

KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING also highlights the multi-part sculpture Elephant Necklace (2016), a glazed ceramic masterwork that comprises 37 abstract elements rendered in black monochrome and arranged in a circle on the floor. Recently exhibited by Pace at the first edition of Art Basel Qatar, the work is part of the artist’s Elephant Necklace series, in which she explores movement, fluctuation, and organic growth through biomorphic looping forms.