Lynda Benglis

For more than five decades, the American artist Lynda Benglis has experimented with materials in a playful, physical, and unpredictable body of work, expanding our understanding of what sculpture can be.

In a career spanning more than 50 years, American artist Lynda Benglis has challenged the distinctions between painting and sculpture, creating a body of work in which materials seem to flow, fold, and take on lives of their own.

Transforming latex, wax, metal, glass, paper, and foam into works that are at once playful, visceral, and unexpected, Lynda Benglis (born in Lake Charles, Louisiana 1941) has been dubbed “the art world’s mischievous alchemist” in a recent New York Times appraisal.

In the late 1960s, Benglis first gained attention with her celebrated pours, in which fluorescent pigments and liquid latex were poured directly onto the floor, dissolving the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and space.

Since then, she has relentlessly explored the capacity of materials to assume form – knotted, folded, stretched, suspended, or flowing – in works that retain something of the energy of movement and transformation. Continuously expanding the limits of sculpture and reshaping our understanding of what it can be.

Benglis’ practice is driven by a rare combination of physical intuition and experimental freedom. Her forms are simultaneously organic and abstract, sensual and monumental. Bringing together works from the late 1960s to fairly recent ones, this exhibition offers an insight into one of the most inventive and influential artistic practices of our time.

Portrait photo: Billie Scheepers