String. Wire. Wood. Sculptors have the remarkable ability to turn something unassuming and make it into something remarkable. Heavy, solid materials like brass and marble are transformed into something that appears soft, almost as though its melting. Knots of colourful yarn tell a story of craft traditions. Through unexpected forms, textures and techniques, these artists challenge our assumptions about what materials can become. These five exhibitions, on display at galleries around the world, rethink our relationship to both our environments and the materials we encounter in our day to day lives.
Sagarika Sundaram: Reservoir
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds | 30 September – 10 January
Sagarika Sundaram explores the sculptural possibilities of wool and felt in monumental, immersive and colourful ways. Reservoir brings together an entirely new body of work by Sundaram, made especially for the exhibition. At its centre, Blue Mountain (2026) is a monumental sculpture stretching almost seven metres in length. Its undulating forms create cave-like spaces. Alongside it, Dancer (2026), extending from floor to ceiling, spirals in a form that is at once shell-like and animated, its movement giving physical expression to the energy suggested by its title. Every sculpture is built through the repeated dyeing, layering and compression of wool before being opened to uncover the colours, spaces and forms within.
Beverly Pepper: Land Art and Monumental Sculptures
National Museum for Women in Art, Washington D.C. | 23 October – 25 April
For more than 70 years, Beverly Pepper (1922 – 2020) explored new purposes and processes in creating large-scale sculpture. Today, she is celebrated for her innovative, hands-on work with iron, steel and earth, materials conventionally associated with male artists. This exhibition features several gallery-scaled sculptures, maquettes for large-scale works, as well as a new film about the artist’s monumental projects. Pepper focused on the essential relationship between sculpture and its environment, whether rural or urban. NMWA complements Beverly Pepper: Ten Monumental Sculptures, an expansive outdoor installation that allows museum visitors to experience Pepper’s work before even reaching the gallery’s doors.
Monika Sosnowska: Weight of Matter
South London Gallery | 10 September – 22 November
Monika Sosnowska is a Polish artist whose sculptural practice explores architecture and urban transformation. Weight of Matter brings together monumental sculptures made from steel, concrete and other industrial materials associated with modernist architecture. Her work reflects on the implosion of the communist regime in Poland and the legacy of modernism, with a particular focus on the impact that architecture and space have on people. A highlight of the exhibition is hosted in the Main Gallery, where a group of large-scale hanging sculptures, some of which weigh over half a tonne. Suspended from the rafters like carcasses, the works merge into an intertwined and sometimes incomprehensible mass.
Hold to This Earth: Works by Contemporary Indigenous North American Artists from Tia Collection
Yorkshire Sculpture Park | Until 18 April 2027
Hold to This Earth is a landmark exhibition of contemporary Indigenous North American art on a scale never seen before in the UK. The show brings together 65 works by 38 artists, and includes two significant new commissions, spanning sculpture, film, photography, painting, ceramics and fibre art. This is an expansive, cross-generational offering, providing a rare insight into the broad spectrum of work being produced by Indigenous North American artists today. Exhibiting artists include Caro Romero, Dakota Mace, Emmi Whitehorse, Sheldon Harvey and Virgil Ortiz. In their hands, materials such as clay, hide, wool, beads and natural pigments become carriers of powerful stories, memory and transition.
Martin Puryear: Nexus
High Museum of Art, Atlanta | Until 17 January
Since the 1970s, Martin Puryear (b. 1941) has captivated the public with beautiful and thought-provoking works inspired by global culture, social history and the natural world. This autumn, High Museum of Art presents the most comprehensive survey of his career in more than two decades. The exhibition features more than 70 works in a rich variety of materials and media, from sculpture in wood, glass, marble and cast bronze to drawings and prints. In Bower (1980), loosely woven strips of spruce and pine delineate a large, open volume evoke the technique of basket-making. Meanwhile, Aso Oke (2019) is a cast-bronze sculpture that borrows its form from the “fila gobi,” a ceremonial cap worn by Yoruba men of Nigeria.
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1. Bob Haozous, Border Crossing, 2026. Courtesy of Tia Collection. Photo: Copyright India Hobson courtesy YSP.
2. Sagarika Sundaram, Rope, 2026. Dyed wool. Courtesy the artist, Henry Moore Institute and Alison Jacques, London. Photo: Rob Harris.
3. Beverly Pepper, Broken Circle, 2011–25, and Todi Columns, 1979–2021; Installation view in Ten Monumental Sculptures, New York Avenue Sculpture Corridor, Washington, D.C., June 2026–June 2027; Photo courtesy of DowntownDC BID.
4. Installation view of Monika Sosnowska: Weight of Matter at the South London Gallery. Photo: Jo Underhill.
5. Bob Haozous, Border Crossing, 2026. Courtesy of Tia Collection. Photo: Copyright India Hobson courtesy YSP.
6. Martin Puryear (American, born Washington, DC, 1941), Big Phrygian, 2010–2014, painted red cedar, Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland. Photo by Ron Amstutz. © Martin Puryear, courtesy of Matthew Marks Gallery.
