Frieze New York

The presentation explores how both artists translate gesture into physical form through their distinct mediums—Pendleton through painting and Benglis through sculpture—revealing their shared interest in pushing the boundaries of abstraction through formal, material, and conceptual innovation.

Pendleton’s paintings challenge convention by blurring distinctions among painting, photography, and drawing, rendering visually active and spatially complex works that give visual form to what the artist describes as the 'complex real'—the onslaught of sensory phenomena and often contradictory information that defines contemporary experience. His painting process begins on paper by exploring the full breadth of mark-making. He layers paint, spray paint, ink, and watercolor, while integrating fragmentary text and geometric forms through stenciling techniques. These works on paper are photographed and then layered using a screen-printing process. The resulting paintings are at once expressionistic, minimal, and conceptually rich.

Benglis has been celebrated for her free, ecstatic forms, which are simultaneously playful, visceral, organic, and abstract, since the 1960s. Having begun her career in the midst of the Postminimal movement, she has continually pushed the tradition of sculpture into new territories, using a variety of materials—from beeswax, latex, and polyurethane foam to plaster, gold, vaporized metals, glass, ceramics, and paper—to experiment with new processes and ideas. Benglis’s embrace of flowing forms, color, and sensual surfaces attests to her inventive and radical spirit as well as her ongoing investigation of the proprioceptive, sensory experiences of making and viewing her sculptures.

At Frieze New York, Pendleton will present four Black Dada paintings from 2024 alongside two new Movement paintings completed this year. Emerging from his processes of translation and transformation, the paintings' surfaces feature both stark contrasts and subtle variations in tone and finish, dissolving immediate distinctions between foreground and background. In his new Movement paintings—which will debut at the Hirshhorn Museum and will be shown for the first time in New York at Frieze—Pendleton has created expressionistic compositions that reveal the poetics and power of the handmade mark. In these works, he meditates on the force and potential of performative gestures and how painting can communicate the limits and spirit of the human body. On the occasion of the fair, Pace Publishing will release a new book on Pendleton's work from his 2024 New York solo exhibition with the gallery, An Abstraction.

Benglis will present six bronze sculptures, created between 2021 and 2024, in Pace’s booth at the fair. Each of these coiling, twisting, jutting, and snaking works in bronze has a relationship with an existing clay sculpture by the artist. Rendered at larger scales than their clay counterparts, her Everdur and White Tombasil bronzes invite a different kind of experience and engagement from the viewer. Glistening and reflective, these sculptures lend shape to feeling, harnessing liquid, buoyant qualities to express the pleasures of gesture and materiality, the powers of memory, the poetics of gravity, and the matter of sensation itself.

During the run of Frieze New York, solo exhibitions of work by Robert Indiana and Robert Mangold will be on view at Pace’s 540 West 25th Street gallery, and a solo show by Alicja Kwade will be presented at the gallery’s 508/510 West 25th Street space.

On May 17, an exhibition of works on paper by Joan Jonas, curated by Pendleton, will open at Pace’s Tokyo gallery—this presentation will shed light on the relationship between drawing and performance in Jonas’s practice.