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Lynda Benglis, Power Tower, 2019, Everdur bronze (golden), 90" × 70-5/8" × 67-13/16" (228.6 cm × 179.3 cm × 172.2 cm) © Lynda Benglis

Lynda Benglis

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b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana

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Since the 1960s, Lynda Benglis has been celebrated for her fearless exploration of forms, which are simultaneously playful and visceral, organic and, abstract.

Benglis began her career in the midst of the Postminimal movement, pushing the traditions of painting and sculpture into new territories. She initiated several bodies of work in the late ’60s and early ’70s that set the course for her subsequent practice. Her wax paintings, which began with brushed skin-like layers of pigmented beeswax and dammar resin progressed, in one series, to the use of a blowtorch as a kind of brush, manipulating colors into a marbleized surface that fought against the constraints of the lozenge-shaped Masonite panels. The impulse to see these forms flow beyond the structure of a traditional support led Benglis to embrace pigmented latex, which she began pouring directly onto the floor. The use of gravity and her body in the latex pours invoked Jackson Pollock’s process, a connection immortalized in the February 27, 1970 issue of Life magazine, which featured Benglis at work.

Concurrently, she began working with pigmented polyurethane foam, building the volume of her sculptures vertically by pouring the oozing, lava-like forms against walls and in the corners of spaces or over constructed armatures and chicken wire, which she removed after the wall mounted foam pours solidified. Benglis’s totem-like sculptures followed as long, cylindrical structures made of wire mesh, cotton bunting, and plaster that, by 1972, she began to tie into knots. Painted with metallic sparkle, Sculp-Metal, or sprayed with layers of vaporized aluminum, copper, zinc, or tin, the works conflate the sculptural object with painterly space and translate the formal idea of "push and pull" into muscular, physical terms. Her gold sculptures of the '70s and early '80s return to the idea of the plane through forms that pinch into torso-like reliefs as well as through pleats that are rendered in reflective skins of gold over plaster and wire mesh.

In the early ’70s, Benglis took new media technologies as her material, producing video art at a time when it was still in its early stages as a medium. Her experimental videos feature performative actions and technological mediation to explore themes of physical presence, narcissism, sexuality, and gendered identity. Physical and Psychological Moments in Time, a retrospective of video works by Benglis, was held in 1975 by Fine Arts Center Gallery, State University of New York College at Oneonta, and subsequently traveled to Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands. Benglis also introduced images of herself into the public discourse through a 1974 artwork placed as an advertisement in Artforum,which challenged assumptions about self-presentation and gender in a male-dominated art world.

Benglis extended her innovative use of materials into the natural realm when, in 1984, she first used water as an element in her sculptures. She won the competition to create a fountain for that year’s Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans, resulting in The Wave of the World (1983–84) in cast bronze. Since then, she created numerous sculptural fountains, including Chimera (1988) and Double Fountain, Mother and Child, For Anand (2007), the latter originally installed at Le Jardin Botanique de Dijon, France, and North South East West (2009), which was initially exhibited at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. These works effectively convey fluidity in both physical and thematic forms through the use of water as a medium.

The embrace of flowing forms, color, and sensual surfaces plays a large part in Benglis’s continuous investigation of the proprioceptive, sensory experiences of making and viewing her sculptures. From the complex chromatic harmonies of the wax paintings to the selected use of brilliant Day-Glo pigments or phosphorescence in her latex and foam sculptures, Benglis’s exuberant engagement with color, along with her radical employment of material, sets her apart from the more achromatic focus of her Minimalist and Postminimal contemporaries.

Benglis has presented over 150 solo exhibitions. She received a mid-career retrospective in 1980, which opened at the Teaching Gallery of the University of South Florida, Tampa, and traveled to the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida. In 1991, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, exhibited Dual Natures, a retrospective of her work that traveled to the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, Louisiana, and San José Museum of Art, California. In 2009, a forty-year retrospective of Benglis’s work was organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and traveled to Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 2015, her work was the subject of a retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield, United Kingdom. Most recently, she has held solo exhibitions at institutions including the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2022); Jardín Banca March, Madrid (2024); and Turner Contemporary, Margate, United Kingdom (2024).

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Lynda Benglis, Odalisque (Hey Hey Frankenthaler), 1969, poured pigmented latex, 165 x 34 in. (419.1 x 86.36 cm) © Lynda Benglis

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Lynda Benglis, EAT MEAT, 1969/1975, cast in 2012, aluminum, 24 x 80 x 54 in. (61 x 203.2 x 137.2 cm) © Lynda Benglis

Sparkle Player by Lynda Benglis

Lynda Benglis, Sparkle Player, 2017, cast sparkles on handmade paper over chicken wire, 37 x 16 x 6-1/2 in. (94 x 40.6 x 16.5 cm) © Lynda Benglis

Sb#2 by Lynda Benglis

Lynda Benglis, Sb#2, 2017, cast sparkles on handmade paper over chicken wire, 36 x 11 x 9 in. (91.4 x 27.9 x 22.9 cm) © Lynda Benglis