Lynda Benglis
Asked to summarize her artistic ambitions in the 1960s, Lynda Benglis replied, “I wasn’t breaking away from painting but trying to redefine what it was.”1 She was raised in Louisiana and moved to New York in 1964, where she trained as a painter in the Abstract Expressionist vein. Benglis admired the gestural style of that older generation of artists, but quickly began to adapt their methods to more extravagant ends. Employing a broad range of materials in acid hues, her best-known works record the behavior of a fluid substance in action. Alongside peers like Eva Hesse, Alan Saret, and Richard Serra, she allowed the process of making to dictate the shape of her finished works, wielding pliant matter that “can and will take its own form.”2
Benglis invented a new format with her celebrated “pours,” which resembled paintings but came off the wall to occupy the space of sculpture. In Blatt and other similar works from 1969, she extended Jackson Pollock’s famed drip technique into three dimensions, spilling liquid rubber directly onto the floor. (A photographer for Life magazine once captured Benglis in mid-pour, lunging forward to sling pigmented latex straight from the can.) Blatt's dayglo swirls retain a look of barely arrested motion, their colors gelled into a kind of psychedelic carpet. Rejecting vertical orientation—as well as canvas, stretcher, and brush—the "pours" push conventions of easel painting to the point of near collapse.
Another viscous material is tested in Benglis’s wax reliefs of the late 1960s. In Embryo II (1967), layers of molten beeswax cling to a Masonite board, hardened into ridges and furrows in a spectrum of pastel hues. This pursuit of what the artist called “the frozen gesture” continues in her fabric knots—silvered coils of cotton bunting wrapped around a wire armature.3 Victor (1974) gleams with metallic paint, and other knots in the series are flecked with glitter and bright acrylic. That cosmetic finish—all spangle and flash—recalls the decorative arts, and mars pure abstraction with jarring materials that connote the lowbrow and the feminine.
Benglis’s interest in gendered stereotypes extends to her pioneering videos. Works like Female Sensibility and Now (1973) play freely with arousal and submission, and questioned the role of the woman artist at the height of the feminist movement. More provocative still were the racy self-portraits she staged in the early 1970s: advertisements and gallery announcements in which she posed like a pinup or porn star. These “sexual mockeries,” as Benglis called them, satirized “the art-star system, and the way artists use themselves, their persona, to sell the work.”4
Introduction by Taylor Walsh, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, 2016
The research for this text was supported by a generous grant from The Modern Women's Fund.
- Introduction
- Lynda Benglis (born October 25, 1941) is an American sculptor and visual artist known especially for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures. She maintains residences in New York City, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Kastellorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India. Landmarks, the public art program of The University of Texas at Austin, exhibited Now (1973) and archived an essay dedicated to Benglis and her work on their website.
- Wikidata
- Q538986
- Nationality
- American
- Gender
- Female
- Roles
- Artist, Photographer, Sculptor, Video Artist
- Names
- Lynda Benglis, Linda Bengalis
- Ulan
- 500092195
Exhibitions
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400: New Monuments
Ongoing
MoMA
Collection gallery
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Studio Visit: Selected Gifts from Agnes Gund
Apr 29–Jul 22, 2018
MoMA
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The Long Run
Nov 11, 2017–May 5, 2019
MoMA
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Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction
Apr 15–Aug 13, 2017
MoMA
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FORTY
Jun 19–Aug 28, 2016
MoMA PS1
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Lynda Benglis has
26 exhibitionsonline.
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Lynda Benglis Embryo II 1967
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Lynda Benglis Blatt 1969
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Lynda Benglis Mumble 1972
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Lynda Benglis Now 1973
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Lynda Benglis Collage 1973
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Lynda Benglis Discrepancy 1973
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Lynda Benglis Enclosure 1973
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Lynda Benglis Female Sensibility 1973
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Lynda Benglis The Grunions are Running 1973
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Lynda Benglis Victor 1974
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Lynda Benglis Modern Art 1970-74 (cast 1973-74)
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Lynda Benglis Modern Art 1970-74 (cast 1973-74)
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Lynda Benglis The Amazing Bow Wow 1976
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Lynda Benglis How's Tricks 1976
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Lynda Benglis Lagniappe II Glitter 1979
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Lynda Benglis Ghost Dance/Pedmarks 1998
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Lynda Benglis Monitor 1999
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Lynda Benglis Double Fountain 2007
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