Lynda Benglis

Lynda Benglis

  • American 1941–

Throughout her career, Lynda Benglis has produced works that expand the boundaries of painting and sculpture. She transferred the “action painting” gesture of Jackson Pollock from the canvas into three dimensions, incorporating it into her poured latex sculptures of the late 1960s and the 1970s. Her work evokes a sense of physicality and embodied space. Benglis has also engaged the relationship between feminism and art, most notably in a series of advertisements that appeared in Artforum in 1974. Her images of herself satirized those of actors and actresses, as well as pin-ups likewise circulating in popular culture. In the final work of the series, which caused the most controversy, Benglis posed naked, except for a pair of sunglasses, with a large latex dildo, thus confronting the male-dominated art scene and the underrepresentation of women in it. She has experimented with a variety of media, from knotted fabric coated in plaster and spray paint, to cast bronze coated in gold leaf, to steel mesh covered in bronze, in sculptures that project from walls. Her works echo the body, both through our experience of them and their biomorphic forms. Benglis has owned a home and studio in the Northwest Woods of East Hampton since 1985.
[Jennifer Kruglinski]

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