She Said She Said — Arlene Shechet

This marks the artist’s first show with Pace in New York since February 2020 and follows her critically acclaimed 2024 presentation Girl Group at Storm King Art Center, which included large-scale outdoor sculptures that have since been acquired by major institutions and collections.

In She Said She Said , Shechet brings her inventive spirit and relentless process of discovery to aluminum, Cor-Ten steel, and clay—materials that feel familiar but become wholly renewed through her touch. With what she refers to as “drawing through sculpture,” the artist expands her inquiries into ideas of lightness, precarity, color, and construction in a new body of work that breathes space into traditionally “solid” mediums.

The monumental sculptures on view extend out of the ethos and power of Girl Group , exhibiting Shechet’s dynamic assembly of forms in which planes of metal are rendered in organic and biomorphic curves across shifting volumes, creating apertures of open space and allowing the touch of their making to shine through. Mark-making and the visible trace of the handmade—the cuts, folds, seams, welds, and joins, all part of the dismantling and revision that makes up her process—are a bridge between Shechet’s metal and clay works. “Shechet’s is an art made of parts, and the frisson, the spark, occurs where the pieces come into contact,” David Salle has written. Her new Touching Ground series in clay harnesses a similar openness and invites a dance between viewer, object, and space through movement—looking around, peering through, and gazing upward are actions masterfully activated by Shechet’s installation methods, which underscore the dynamic between sculpture and the body.

A maverick in her field, Shechet has led a resurgence of ceramic work in contemporary art. “Marginalised for its association with craft rather than fine art,” Kate Neave has written, she “has breathed new life into this ancient material.” For Touching Ground, Shechet revived the ancient ceramic practice of terra sigillata, or “sealed earth,” used to create Greek and Roman tableware. Highly refined liquid clay particles are applied in layers and absorbed, transforming the material over time as it dries. The sculptures are then carefully burnished, leaving a luminous, almost shiny surface without glaze. Clay on clay, the surface and the structure are one and the same.

In part inspired by the painting process of Agnes Martin, in which she applied thin layers of pigment to the canvas, Shechet’s use of terra sigillata allows for a more embodied and multidimensional act of creation. “Clay is a great drawing material,” she says. “It’s a direct link to my body. I could grab the clay, play with it, make these things that are like painting, drawing, sculptures, have them coalesce, stick them in the kiln, and they harden, and then they’re there. I think that’s magic.” With rich reds, blacks, and oranges that recall ancient Greek and Roman vases, Touching Ground ushers in a sense of meditative calm and vaporous expansiveness while also capturing the mood and realities of the present day: “I want people to feel the joy and desperation, the abject and the beautiful,” says Shechet. “I am seeking the full range, not one thing, because I think that’s what it’s like to be alive.”

The exhibition emphasizes the relational nature of sculpture while also leaning into a sense of twinning, evident in two-sided compositions, formal pairings, and the double-entendres lurking in all of Shechet’s titles. The show title She Said She Said plays with the idea of a rumor, of the transformation of a thought as it gets passed from one subject to another, taking on new life—a form of abstraction itself—as it is reimagined.

About the artist

Arlene Shechet is a sculptor known for her effortless combination of disparate elements, precarious and provisional arrangements, and boundary-collapsing visual paradoxes. With gravity-defying work that seems to tilt, contort, bend, and melt, Shechet’s sculptures appear to be set in motion while unearthing the expressive potential of material and forms and forcing us to sit with—and move around—its contradictions. Shechet began working with clay in 2007 and has since developed a unique practice, changing the landscape of ceramic as medium. Highly technical yet entirely intuitive, her practice embraces improvisation and seeks to examine the humor and pathos of the lived human experience. Embracing the inherent duality of clay—its malleability and durability, its fragility and hardened strength—Shechet has led a resurgence of ceramic work in contemporary art through her experiments with glazes, hybrid forms, and pedestals by embracing risk, rejecting binaries, and leaning into—and driving dialogue between—the underlying tensions of not only form and material, but life itself.