Pace Gallery will open three new exhibitions on West 25th Street on the same night, Thursday, Nov. 5, with receptions from 6 to 8 p.m. The largest of the three is a 40-ton steel sculpture by the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset that visitors can walk through, installed at 508 and 510 West 25th Street. Down the block at 540 West 25th Street, Pace will show box sculptures by Lucas Samaras alongside fabric works he has never exhibited before, plus the first New York solo show by the London painter Li Hei Di. All three open to the public on Friday, Nov. 6.

Elmgreen & Dragset: TRANSITION

Michael Elmgreen, born in Copenhagen in 1961, and Ingar Dragset, born in Trondheim, Norway, in 1969, have worked together for decades on art that plays with architecture and the way people move through buildings. New Yorkers may remember their 2016 piece Van Gogh's Ear, a full-size swimming pool stood on its end in front of Rockefeller Center. Their roadside work Prada Marfa, a replica boutique on U.S. Route 90 near Valentine, Texas, dates to 2005.

For TRANSITION, the pair has built a traversable steel sculpture weighing 40 tons, which means visitors can enter and pass through it rather than just circle it. A new series of wall works hangs alongside. Pace says more details about the show will follow. TRANSITION runs Nov. 6, 2026, to Jan. 16, 2027.

Lucas Samaras: Boxes and Reconstructions

Lucas Samaras, the Greek-born American artist whose career stretched across more than seven decades, began making his box sculptures in the early 1960s. He built them from found materials such as cutlery, nails, mirrors, yarn and feathers, layered with photographs and other personal ephemera. Over the years the series grew to nearly 300 unique pieces.

The Pace show selects boxes made from the 1960s through the 1980s to trace how the series changed, including Box #5 (1963 to 1968), Stiff Box #14, a 1971 piece in Cor-ten steel, and Box #133 from 1989. The second half of the title refers to a group of hand-sewn fabric works Samaras made in 1979. Pace says these Reconstructions come from the artist's personal collection and are being shown for the first time. The exhibition runs Nov. 6, 2026, to Jan. 23, 2027.

Samaras grew up during the Greek Civil War and came of age in the New York avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s, taking part in the Happenings movement while a student at Rutgers. That personal history runs through much of his work, which also spanned photography, painting, drawing and digital art.

Li Hei Di: the year of mud

The third opening is a set of new paintings by Li Hei Di, a London-based artist who studied at Chelsea College of Arts and the Royal College of Art and joined Pace in 2024. The paintings sit between figuration and abstraction, with figures that never settle into a single fixed form. The title points to Nüwa, the goddess in Chinese mythology who is said to have shaped the first people out of mud. Pace describes the installation as something that reveals itself gradually as a visitor walks through the rooms.

Li has had solo shows in Shanghai, Los Angeles, London and at Pace's Hong Kong space, but the year of mud is the artist's first solo exhibition with Pace in New York. It runs Nov. 6 to Dec. 19, 2026. Pace Publishing plans a monograph on Li's recent painting after the show closes, with a new essay by Tyler Blackwell, a curator at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville.

Planning a visit

  • Opening receptions: Thursday, Nov. 5, 6 to 8 p.m., for all three shows
  • Addresses: TRANSITION at 508 and 510 West 25th Street; Samaras and Li Hei Di at 540 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
  • Gallery hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; closed Sunday and Monday
  • Cost: Pace's gallery pages list no admission fee
  • Subway: The C and E trains to 23 St at Eighth Avenue, then walk west on 25th Street. The High Line's West 23rd Street entrance is also close by.

With the three galleries a few doors apart, the Nov. 5 receptions make it possible to see all of the new work in a single evening. Anyone who misses opening night has until mid-December at the earliest, and into January for the two larger shows.

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