Subheadline:
At Pace Gallery in Chelsea, Lynda Benglis turns knots, folds, pleats, ceramics, glass, bronze, paper, and surface into a five-decade investigation of movement—where sculpture behaves like painting and gesture becomes physical form.

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A knot can hold something together.

A fold can create volume.

A pleat can catch light.

A gesture can become sculpture.

For more than five decades, Lynda Benglis has transformed these seemingly ordinary physical actions into an expansive artistic language. At Pace Gallery in New York, KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING brings that language into sharp focus, tracing how the artist has repeatedly taken flexible, malleable, or seemingly unstable materials and turned them into objects charged with movement.

On view September 11 through October 24, 2026, at Pace’s 540 West 25th Street gallery, the exhibition spans works made between 1972 and 2024. It includes glazed ceramic, bronze, pleated and paper sculptures, alongside rarely exhibited glass works from 1985.

Rather than presenting Benglis’s career as a straightforward chronology, the exhibition reveals recurring physical ideas: knotting, tying, folding, twisting, stretching, pouring, and layering.

The gesture is the subject.

The material is its evidence.

From Painting Beyond the Canvas

Benglis emerged in the late 1960s during the rise of Postminimalism, but her approach quickly diverged from the movement’s more restrained visual language.

She was interested in what happened when painting refused to remain inside its traditional boundaries.

Her early experiments with pigmented beeswax and dammar resin eventually led to works in which a blowtorch became a kind of brush. She then moved into pigmented latex, pouring material directly onto floors and allowing gravity and bodily movement to shape the resulting forms.

That physicality became fundamental to her practice.

The artwork was no longer simply an image.

It could be a trace of an action.

A material could sag, fold, stretch, drip, harden, or curl.

The resulting sculpture preserved the memory of what the artist had physically done.

This idea of the “frozen gesture” would become one of the most useful ways to understand Benglis’s work.

Sparkle Knot IV: Where the Knot Begins

The earliest work in the Pace exhibition is Sparkle Knot IV from 1972.

Constructed from wire mesh covered in plaster, paint, and sparkles, it signals Benglis’s early investigation of knotting as a sculptural process.

The knot is deceptively simple.

It suggests compression and tension.

It implies movement that has suddenly stopped.

And because a knot is created through a physical sequence of actions, it retains an almost bodily quality.

For Benglis, the knot would become far more than a decorative shape.

It became a structural idea.

Something could be twisted into itself, pulled outward, compressed, stretched, or suspended between opposing forces.

Pleats as Light, Structure, and Movement

The exhibition places particular emphasis on Benglis’s pleated wall-mounted sculptures from 1982 through 1990.

These works began with accordion-pleated wire mesh. Benglis manipulated the mesh through knotting, tying, and twisting before covering it with plaster and gold leaf or, in later works, vaporized metals.

The resulting surfaces are simultaneously rigid and dynamic.

They appear folded yet monumental.

Their metallic surfaces catch and redirect light.

The work therefore changes as the viewer moves.

A sculpture that initially seems fixed becomes optically active.

Light becomes part of the composition.

The wall becomes part of the sculpture.

And the viewer’s movement becomes part of the experience.

This concern with changing light is central to Benglis’s understanding of the pleated works. The physical fold becomes an optical event.

Glass as a “Play-Dance” Activity

Among the exhibition’s less familiar works are a group of unique sand-cast glass sculptures made in 1985.

These works reveal another side of Benglis’s willingness to treat material experimentation as physical performance.

For the glass pieces, colorful glass shards, enamel eyes, and powdered glass were placed into molds made from sand. Molten black or clear glass was then poured into the forms. Benglis subsequently manipulated the hot material using Kevlar gloves and sticks, bending and tying it into knots.

The process was intensely physical.

Benglis has described it as a kind of “play-dance activity.”

The resulting works appear playful and abstract, with forms that can suggest living organisms or celestial bodies. Some titles—including Desert Pupfish and Gila Top Minnow—reinforce that biological association.

The sculptures demonstrate something essential about Benglis’s practice:

The material is never passive.

Glass, metal, paper, ceramic, and bronze each impose different physical conditions.

The artist responds to those conditions through gesture.

When Paper Becomes Spatial

The exhibition also moves into Benglis’s paper sculptures from 2016 through 2020.

These works use chicken wire covered with handmade paper, sometimes painted or saturated with sparkles.

At first glance, the material sounds fragile.

But Benglis uses that fragility to construct volume.

The paper is stretched over wire like skin over an underlying structure.

Marks of different sizes and densities cover the surface.

The distinction between drawing and sculpture becomes increasingly difficult to maintain.

A mark is no longer simply ink or pigment on a flat plane.

It exists across a curved surface.

Benglis has described her approach to drawing in relation to her understanding of surface as spatial.

In this sense, the paper works return to one of her oldest questions:

What happens when painting becomes physically present?

Ceramics as “Architecture of Gestures”

Benglis’s ceramics from the 2010s take the question even further.

Their folds, loops, cascades, and glazed surfaces resemble gestures that have suddenly become solid.

The forms can look fluid even though they have been permanently fired.

They appear to be moving without actually moving.

Benglis has described the ceramics as an attempt to create an “architecture of gestures”—to make painting physically present through an explosion or implosion of forms.

That description captures the larger logic of KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING.

The artist is not simply making objects.

She is materializing actions.

Elephant Necklace: The Knot Opens Out

One of the exhibition’s major recent works is Elephant Necklace from 2016.

The glazed ceramic sculpture consists of 37 abstract elements arranged in a circle on the floor, rendered in a black monochrome.

The work belongs to Benglis’s Elephant Necklace series, which explores movement, fluctuation, and organic growth through biomorphic looping forms.

The knot is still there—but its scale and spatial organization have changed.

Instead of a single tightly compressed form, the elements create an expansive circular structure.

The viewer must walk around it.

Movement is no longer represented only by the sculpture.

It is produced by the viewer’s relationship to the sculpture.

Pace notes that Benglis developed the Elephant Necklace works as part of an exploration of looping forms, movement, and organic growth.

Bronze: Frozen Movement in the Round

Recent bronze sculptures extend this exploration into another material.

Large-scale reflective bronzes in the exhibition use rounded organic forms that appear to undulate as viewers move around them.

Bronze is traditionally associated with permanence.

Benglis makes it look unstable.

The polished surface reflects the gallery environment.

The sculpture appears to absorb its surroundings.

As the viewer moves, the reflected space changes.

The object therefore seems to move without physically changing position.

This is another version of the frozen gesture: a permanent object that creates an experience of continuous transformation.

Six Decades of Material Experimentation

Benglis’s career is remarkable not simply because of its longevity, but because of the variety of materials she has consistently embraced.

Her practice has moved through beeswax, latex, polyurethane foam, plaster, gold, vaporized metals, glass, ceramics, paper, and bronze.

The point is not material variety for its own sake.

Each material offers a different answer to the same fundamental questions.

How does a body shape an object?

How does gravity affect form?

How can a surface become spatial?

How can color alter physical perception?

How can a gesture survive after the gesture itself has ended?

These questions connect works separated by decades.

A Contemporary Resonance Beyond Sculpture

Benglis’s influence is also extending beyond the gallery.

In 2026, Dior’s Fall/Winter haute couture collection explicitly responded to her work. Pace notes that designer Jonathan Anderson drew on Benglis’s knotting, pleating, and draping, translating the sculptural qualities of her surfaces into couture materials and techniques.

The connection is particularly revealing.

Fashion and sculpture share a fundamental problem: how does a flat or flexible material become three-dimensional?

Fabric can fold.

Wire can bend.

Paper can stretch.

Ceramic can curl.

Clothing can turn a body into architecture.

Benglis has spent decades exploring precisely this transformation.

Why KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING Matters Now

At a time when so much visual culture is experienced through screens, Benglis’s work insists on physical presence.

Her sculptures cannot be reduced to photographs.

A photograph cannot fully reproduce the changing reflection of bronze.

It cannot reproduce the physical tension of a knot.

It cannot make the viewer walk around Elephant Necklace.

It cannot reproduce the sensation of a pleated surface catching the light.

This is sculpture as bodily experience.

The work requires proximity.

It requires movement.

And it rewards looking from more than one angle.

The Gesture Remains

The title KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING describes actions rather than objects.

That distinction is important.

Benglis’s sculptures are records of things being done.

They preserve pressure, tension, folding, stretching, twisting, pouring, and shaping.

The finished artwork may be static, but its visual language is active.

A knot remembers being tied.

A fold remembers being pressed.

A pleat remembers being compressed.

A loop remembers being bent.

The sculpture becomes a kind of physical memory.

Lynda Benglis in Chelsea

At Pace Gallery, KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING brings this language together across more than five decades.

From Sparkle Knot IV in 1972 to recent bronze and ceramic works, the exhibition demonstrates that Benglis has never treated sculpture as a fixed category.

She has treated it as a process.

A material can behave like paint.

A drawing can become spatial.

A wall can become part of an object.

A surface can become architecture.

A knot can become a landscape of movement.

And a gesture can become permanent.

In Chelsea, those ideas converge into an exhibition that is ultimately less about tying things together than about showing how an artist has spent six decades refusing to keep painting, sculpture, drawing, surface, and body apart.