The 84-year-old American sculptor Lynda Benglis is having an extraordinarily busy year. Her exhibition is currently on view in New York at Pace Gallery, with a major retrospective at Kunstmuseum Basel opening next spring, which will then travel on to London and Denmark. On top of all that, July brought a surprising collaboration with Dior.
Right now in New York: Knotting, Tying, Folding
Pace Gallery in New York opened Knotting, Tying, Folding on September 11, running through October 24, 2026. The show brings together sculptural work spanning more than five decades. It includes smoothly glazed ceramic, heavy bronze, delicately pleated pieces, and fragile paper forms made between 1972 and 2024. The exhibition also features rarely shown glass sculptures from 1985.
Since the late 1960s, Benglis has developed her lively, flowing forms across a wide range of materials. These include beeswax, latex, and polyurethane foam, later joined by plaster, gold, vaporized metals, glass, ceramic, and paper. She emerged alongside the rise of Postminimalism. She set herself apart from her contemporaries through her enthusiastic embrace of vivid, almost brazen color and sensuous, organic surfaces.
In the same period, the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University is preparing its own solo presentation, Lynda Benglis: Elemental (January 20 – May 20, 2027). The show, moreover, examines how the Louisiana coast, where she was born, shaped her work. Benglis will also appear, meanwhile, in the group exhibition Frozen Gestures at NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale (November 13, 2026 – April 11, 2027).
Crossover: a dialogue with Giacometti
Just before all this, Benglis also appeared at the Barbican in London. Encounters: Giacometti x Lynda Benglis, moreover, was the third and final chapter in a series staged in collaboration with the Fondation Giacometti. There, she exhibited nearly 30 previously unshown works made from handmade paper stretched over wire mesh, embellished with glitter, acrylic, and watercolor. Alongside them, meanwhile, stood Giacometti’s historic, gaunt bronze figures.
When Dior became her love letter
Amid all these exhibitions, Benglis also caught the attention of an entirely different audience in July. When Dior unveiled its fall/winter 2026–2027 haute couture collection in Paris that month, audiences were watching for just one thing, a hint of the wedding dress designed by Jonathan Anderson for pop star Taylor Swift. The collection, however, ultimately unfolded as a love letter to a different woman altogether, Benglis herself. It was, according to the house, a direct response, in the language of haute couture, to her lifelong body of work.
The collection’s anchor piece was her sculpture Kissel, made of bronze wire and coolly chrome-plated nickel. On the runway, it became a strapless, silver pleated cocktail dress. The design also nodded to an original Dior gown from nearly eighty years earlier. The same motif appeared on the new Cigale bag and on a helmet-like headpiece. A white dress with an iridescent sheen, meanwhile, referenced her 1979 series, dyed paper pulp shaped and finished with glitter and cellophane folded into a bow.
According to curator Andrew Bonacina, who worked with Anderson on the collection, Benglis’s work can read as baroque, even gaudy, since it challenges the very notion of good taste. Using glitter on sculpture was original, and quite shocking, when she first did it. Many of her peers at the time, however, were genuinely confused by it, though today it ranks among her most radical gestures.
Crossover: the Peacock series and India
Benglis has kept studios all over the world, including in Santa Fe, Greece, and India. India, in particular, surfaces vividly in the collection. Deep pink gowns trimmed with fringe, reminiscent of a bustling Indian market, reference her Peacock series from the late 1970s, made while she was staying at her patron’s estate in Ahmedabad. That series, moreover, also led Anderson deeper into the eighteenth-century tradition of chintz.
Anderson also slipped in a hidden reference, legible only to those in the know. One garment carries a blurred, translucent silhouette of Benglis’s torso, a direct nod to her once-controversial 1974 advertisement in Artforum. In it, a 33-year-old Benglis, wearing only oil, posed astride a massive sex toy. She later described the act as “the ultimate mockery of the pinup and the macho.” The ad caused an uproar across the art world and still threatens to overshadow the rest of her otherwise rich body of work.
Following the runway show, Anderson also opened a public exhibition, Grammar of Forms, staged in the shaded gardens of the Musée Rodin. The courtyard featured a black lacquered checkerboard floor and exotic-looking borrowed tropical palms. It wasn’t the first time he’d referenced Benglis, her gold sculptures had also adorned the runway set during his time at Loewe. This, however, marked the first collaboration where her work directly inspired the collection itself, rather than just the setting around it.
Crossover: Dior had art in its blood from the start
This exploration of art within fashion ultimately follows in the footsteps of Christian Dior himself. Early in his career, he exhibited works by Braque, Matisse, Picasso, Dalí, and Christian Bérard in his own galleries. That experience would later shape his “Milieu du siècle” collections. Under Anderson, artists continue to accompany the house of Dior.
Rising value
Benglis is represented by Pace Gallery, which signed her in 2019. Her pleated sculptures, a key inspiration for the entire Anderson collection, now sell for between $1.5 and $3 million. It’s proof, in other words, that she’s long since ceased to be an overlooked artist, and has become one of the defining figures in American sculpture of the second half of the 20th century.
Where and when
Pace Gallery, 510 West 25th Street, New York. Knotting, Tying, Folding, September 11 – October 24, 2026. Kunstmuseum Basel | Neubau, major retrospective, March 13 – August 1, 2027, traveling on to Tate Modern in London (September 30, 2027 – March 5, 2028) and finally to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark (May – September 2028).
