Pace opens three solos where Benglis, Dyson, and Shechet each refuse material’s given terms

Chelsea has seen concurrent gallery programs before, but Pace’s autumn opener makes the simultaneity feel deliberate: three artists, three solos, one question running underneath all of them. Lynda Benglis, Torkwase Dyson, and Arlene Shechet each arrive with bodies of work that depend on the gap between what a medium is presumed to do and what a practiced hand can force it to admit. The grouping is not programmatic — these are three separate exhibitions across three adjacent Pace spaces — but the conversation they generate is hard to dismiss.

Benglis’s show — KNOTTING, TYING, FOLDING at 540 West 25th Street — brings together sculptural work across more than five decades: glazed ceramic, bronze, pleated and paper forms made between 1972 and 2024, alongside glass sculptures from 1985 that have rarely been exhibited. The glass pieces in particular mark a detour in an otherwise continuous inquiry: where her knotted bronzes make mass look like it has escaped gravity, the glass works introduce a translucency that remembers what solid can still refuse to be.

Lynda Benglis, Kutumb (five elements) detail, glazed ceramic sculpture, 1981-1982 — Lynda Benglis, Kutumb (five elements) (detail), 1981–1982. © Lynda Benglis / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Pace Gallery

The exhibition follows growing institutional attention to Benglis’s full range. Earlier this year, the Barbican Centre in London paired her work with Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures in a series designed to test contemporary artists against a canonical modernist. A major retrospective opens at Kunstmuseum Basel next spring and travels to Tate Modern in the autumn, while a separate solo at Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University examines how Louisiana’s Gulf Coast shaped her early development.

In the adjacent gallery space, Dyson’s “Seeing in Blue” is the first painting series she has built directly from her practice as a deep-sea diver. The works register the sensory conditions of being underwater: distance, light refracted through the weight of water, the boundary where atmospheric phenomena meet the infrastructure humans have laid through and below sea level. The paintings are informed by a body of diagrammatic drawings, engineering notes, and process poems Dyson made during the expeditions — what she calls the “boundless state change of water” distilled through haptic memory and embodied research. Her large-scale installation Tougaloo remains on view at the Venice Arsenale through November, extending a year in which her work has held simultaneous institutional space on two continents.

Arlene Shechet stands beside her monumental sculpture Flo in Pace Gallery courtyard, 2026 — Arlene Shechet with Flo (2026). Photography by Cole Wilson. Courtesy Pace Gallery

Arlene Shechet occupies the West 25th Street spaces at 508 and 510 with “She Said She Said,” her first New York show with Pace since February 2020. Three monumental sculptures in aluminum and Cor-Ten steel anchor the main room: forms in organic and biomorphic curves where the marks of their making — the plane’s give, the weld’s trace — are part of the surface argument. Alongside them, the Touching Ground series in clay proposes a different register: smaller, open ceramic works that choreograph movement between viewer, object, and space, asking the body to look around and through rather than at. Shechet refers to her process as “drawing through sculpture” — the phrase fits both the metal and the clay, each form the record of an act, not a resolved object.

All three exhibitions run through October 24 at Pace’s West 25th Street locations. Press inquiries: press@pacegallery.com.

Tags: pace gallery, Lynda Benglis, Arlene Shechet, contemporary art exhibitions, sculpture, Torkwase Dyson