LYNDA BENGLIS

On view from November 30 to December 31, the show will coincide with the upcoming edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, where Pace will present Benglis’s 2019 bronze sculpture Power Tower in its booth. On Saturday, December 3, during New Wave Art Weekend, Pace’s Palm Beach space will remain open until 7 PM, hosting a public cocktail reception amid COLOR + FORM from 3 to 5 PM. In November, ahead of the opening of this exhibition, Benglis’s new monograph will be released by Phaidon.

Benglis’s forthcoming exhibition in Palm Beach will bring together several bodies of work that speak to the breadth of her practice: seven unique monotype prints from the artist’s Palmetto series, which feature direct impressions of fan-like fronds inked by the artist’s hand; six small-scale Elephant Necklace ceramics; a cast pigmented polyurethane sculpture titled _Hot Lip_s (2020); and a freestanding, reflective bronze sculpture from 2020.

In her Palmetto series, which comprises some 31 prints made in 1989, the artist’s enduring interest in the dynamism and graphic possibilities of pleated forms is on full view. With these two-dimensional works, the artist makes use of readymade materials from the natural world, grounding her compositions in sweeping, semi-abstract traces of Palmetto fronds.

The sculptures in the exhibition reflect Benglis’s interest in working with singular forms across varied materials. Presented in conversation with one another, the artist’s series of Elephant Necklace ceramics, created in 2016 and featuring monochromatic glazes of yellow, coral, and black, and her related large-scale bronze Zero Cobra (2020) are results of her explorations of rounded organic structures. Benglis has been developing, refining, and reworking knotted sculptural forms—like those in the Elephant Necklace series and Zero Cobra—throughout her career, investigating relationships between materiality and scale in works that seem to undulate and shape shift as viewers move around them. The artist’s textured abstraction Hot Lips, rendered in vibrant red, brings questions of mass and coloration to her Palm Beach exhibition.