This two-person presentation will situate recent bronze sculptures by Benglis in conversation with cast paper drawings by Shechet, conjuring new exchanges among the artists’ works.

Benglis’s three bronze sculptures in the exhibition belong to a lexicon of sculptural forms that the artist has been developing, refining, and reworking over the course of her career. These works began as small ceramic sculptures that Benglis refers to as “Elephant Necklaces.” The artist transposes her formal experimentations with clay into her undulating, luminous, and reflective bronze sculptures that register the presence and pressure of her fingers at the moment of contact with the original material. Domestically scaled, these bronze works evoke waves, eddies, and whorls frozen in time, building on the visual motifs from Benglis’s 2021 solo exhibition with Pace in New York. Concurrently with this show at Pace in East Hampton, Benglis is presenting a major solo exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, on view through September 18.

Shechet will present ten cast paper drawings made from abaca—a natural leaf fiber—in the East Hampton exhibition. Made at Dieu Donne Papermill in New York, the unique drawings in the show date between 1997 and 2004, and they have been rendered in two different sizes: 18″ x 18″ and 24″ x 24″. Exploring Buddhist notions of impermanence as both a subject and a model for her process, Shechet has incorporated Buddhist iconography into these works. Creating stencils and templates to render Buddhist stupas as flat architectural plans, the artist applies pigmented paper pulp using the pochoir technique to draw out and capture the layered images. Color bleeds in unpredictable flurries in the resulting compositions, through which Shechet aims to deconstruct three-dimensional stupas by translating their floor plans back into the two-dimensional mandala symbol that informed their architectural layouts. The artist’s solo exhibition at T Space in Rhinebeck, New York, continues through August 28.

Gallery: 68 Park Place, East Hampton

Time: 4 — 6 PM

Free!