Pace Gallery exhibited a Two-Artist Presentation of Adam Pendleton in Dialogue with Lynda Benglis for Frieze New York 2025

Installation view of Pace at Frieze New York, Booth # B10, The Shed, May 7 –11, 2025. Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace’s presentation for the 2025 edition of Frieze New York, ran from May 7 to 11 at The Shed. Curated by Adam Pendleton, the gallery's booth (B10) it featured six of his recent paintings alongside six new and recent sculptures by Lynda Benglis. 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.

Adam Pendleton Untitled (Movement), 2024-2025 PAINTING silk screen ink and black gesso on canvas 96" × 80" (243.8 cm × 203.2 cm). © Adam Pendleton, courtesy Pace Gallery

This year’s edition of Frieze New York coincides with Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen, on view at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. from April 4, 2025 to January 3, 2027. Anchoring the museum’s 50th anniversary celebration, this major exhibition brings together paintings from multiple bodies of work as well as a new single-channel video work. The artist’s presentations at both the Hirshhorn and Frieze focus on his unique contributions to contemporary American painting.

Left to right: Lynda Benglis, Heart Of The Matter, 2024 © Lynda Benglis / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Adam Pendleton,Black Dada (K), 2025 © Adam Pendleton, courtesy Pace Gallery

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.

Installation view of Pace at Frieze New York, Booth # B10, The Shed, May 7 –11, 2025 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

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.

Adam Pendleton Black Dada (K), 2024-2025 PAINTING silk screen ink and black gesso on canvas, two parts 36" × 28-1/2" (91.4 cm × 72.4 cm) framed, 37-7/8" × 30-3/8" × 2-1/4" (96.2 cm × 77.2 cm × 5.7 cm) © Adam Pendleton, courtesy Pace Gallery

At Frieze New York, Pendleton presented 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 debuted 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.

Lynda Benglis Lasso, 2023 SCULPTURE Everdur bronze 22" × 28-1/2" × 36" (55.9 cm × 72.4 cm × 91.4 cm). © Lynda Benglis / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Benglis presented 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. All six of these sculptures paired with Pendleton’s paintings come from Benglis’s private collection and are being presented publicly for the first time at Frieze.

Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.

Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.

Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.

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.

For more information about Pace Gallery during this year’s Frieze LA, please visit the  Pace Gallery’s website here, Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy. To keep up to date on all the latest news from Frieze, sign up to the newsletter here and follow on Instagram, X, and Frieze Official on Facebook.