Art Basel Qatar

A pioneering figure in post-1960s art, Benglis has been at the forefront of material experimentation for six decades, continually inventing new ways of working with different media. Exploring a wide range colors, textures, and forms in her work, she investigates the proprioceptive and sensory experiences of making and viewing sculpture—having a profound impact on contemporary understandings of what sculpture can be.

Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1941, the artist began producing ceramics during her college days, returning to the material in the early 1990s, when she initiated a long series of collaborations with the ceramics fabricator Saxe Patterson, Inc. in Taos, New Mexico and began using the electric clay extruder as part of her process. Like a pasta maker, the electric extruder produces tubes or strips of clay, which the artist catches, cradles, and rapidly shapes by hand in a physical, intuitive “dance.”

Benglis began creating her Elephant Necklaces during a burst of creative energy in 2016, just after a group of paper wall reliefs left her studio for an exhibition. She correlates this series of hand-wrought, glazed ceramic curls with the blown-out tires of tractor trailer transports strewn on the sides of countless American highways. These works speak to her enduring interest in the morphology and semiotics of the knot, which she has explored since the early 1970s through enactments of tying and folding in her sculptures. Coiling, twisting, and snaking, her Elephant Necklaces evoke entanglement and motion, capturing a moment of bodily expression and thus epitomizing the artist’s notion of “frozen gesture.” “Elephant Necklaces are artifacts that I imagine as extrusions of life,” Benglis has said. “They could be described as fragments from mammoths’ trunks of an ancient time. Or perhaps they resemble strange umbilical cords cut after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.”

Prior to the Elephant Necklace sculptures, Benglis made two major bodies of work with extruded clay: one large group, which dates from 1992 to 1998, and the second made in 2013. The ceramic sculptures from both periods merge painting and sculpture through expressionistic and colorful glazes. The Elephant Necklaces are set apart from these two earlier bodies of work by their monochrome coloration, which emphasizes the speeds of their shapes. Striations left by the extruder are the only marks that lead the viewer through the convolutions of their complex forms.

Elephant Necklace Circle was first shown in the previously mentioned exhibition of Benglis’s paper works in 2016. Whereas the paper pieces are painterly and of the air, Elephant Necklace Circle is monochrome and of the Earth. The arrangement of its elements in a circle on the ground came about during the installation process. Instead of situating the sculptures on pedestals, Benglis instead laid them out on the floor, arranging them in a circle to create a single work. Rarely creating a sculpture from so many individual parts, Benglis brings 37 idiosyncratic shapes into a lively, cacophonous conversation with Elephant Necklace Circle—a cyclical convergence that seemingly has no end.

Select Elephant Necklaces within Elephant Necklace Circle have been used as models for larger-scale knot forms cast in bronze, including Striking Cobra (2020), a monumental bronze sculpture that was featured in Loewe’s spring/summer 2024 women’s runway show in Paris as part of Benglis’s ongoing collaboration with the fashion house.

Pace’s presentation of Benglis’s work at Art Basel Qatar will be followed by Lynda Benglis Encounters: Giacometti—organized as part of a series pairing contemporary artists’ work with Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures—at the Barbican in London, running from February 12 to May 31, and a solo show of her work opening at the gallery’s New York flagship in November. Next year, during the 2027 edition of Art Basel, the Kunstmuseum Basel will open a major retrospective on the artist—this presentation will travel to two other European museums.