Lynda Benglis - Beau Livre

For over five decades, Lynda Benglis has made art that defies aesthetic orthodoxies. In her ceaselessly innovative engagements wits new materials, distinctions between painting and sculpture, soft and hard, organic and artificial, high and law, and male and female are complicated or upended entirely Through her exchanges with her materials, Benglis allows in the sights, textures, and colours of her life, experience and landscape.
Benglis is best known for her early work as an artist who came of age amidst Post-Minimalism and Process Art. The 'Waxen gestures' of her intensely coloured, Floor bound latex paintings and installations of cantilevered polyurethane-foam pours established her ongoing interest in colour, Flow, transformation and proprioception as well as her desire to work with untraditional materials Benglis has also been celebrated for her pioneering work in video in the 1970s as well as her 1974 advertisements in the pages of Artforum which challenged assumptions about self-presentation and gender in the art world.
Benglis has centered her practice on creating objects that relate to the scale and feeling Of the body in space and which often play on the tension between form and surface. Her formal concerns are infused with a love of pleasure, play, and a tendency to thumb her nose at received ideas of taste and propriety. In spite of the wide range of materials she has worked with, continuities and progressions persist.
The arrested streams of her first foam pours develop into her first fountain in 1984, which uses water to further activate the form. The visceral convolutions of her 1970s sparkle knots unravel in her recent paper pieces to reveal airy skeletons of chicken wire. The gestural wrestling in the ceramics of the 1990s and 2010s gives way to her latest whiplash planes of gleaming bronze. Throughout, Benglis offers the viewer an open-ended challenge t0 what art can be and a seductive invitation to experience Born in 1941 in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Lynda Benglis began her artistic studies at Newcomb College (now part of Tulane University).
After earning her BFA in 1964, she moved to New York to study painting at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. Monographic presentations of her work have been held in e of the most prestigious international institutions, including the Elne Arts Center Gallery, State University of New York College at Oneonta (1975), the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (1991)', the Auckland Art Gallery Toi 0 Tarnaki (1993) ; the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2009) ; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2011), the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, (2015) ; the Hepworth Wakefield.
England (2015), the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens (2019), the National Gallery of Art, Washington OC (2021) and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Callas (2022). In the Interview Andrew Bonacina discusses with annals her motives and working methods. In her Survey, Bibiana Obler covers the most important episodes in the artist's career from the 1960s onwards. Nora Lawrence's Focus concentrates on Hills and Clouds (2013-15), Menglis's relationship with water and how this resulted in the 'fountains, one of her most relevant bodies of work.