Lynda Benglis
Lynda Benglis
born 1941
American sculptor. She studied art and philosophy at McNeese College in Lake Charles (1959–63) before moving to New York and studying art at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art (1964–5). Benglis admired, and she was influenced by, the work of Abstract Expressionists, such as Franz Kline. Her first exhibitions were at the Bykert Gallery, New York (1968 and 1969), showing wax paintings and poured-latex sculptures. In 1969 she began working with polyurethane foam and made Brünhilde, her first projecting foam piece, as a performance at the Galerie Müller, Cologne, in 1970. She began to collaborate with Robert Morris (ii) in 1971, which resulted in her video Mumble (1972) and Morris’s video Exchange (1973). Benglis ran a controversial advertisement in an issue of Artforum (November 1974), in which she posed nude in an aggressively provocative pose with a dildo. Also in 1974 she showed at the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, exhibiting the metallized knots that she had begun a few years earlier. From the mid-1970s she worked in various media but still continued to produce her metallized forms, creating baroque forms in bronze and aluminium (e.g. Eclat, aluminium on stainless steel mesh, 1990; New York, Paula Cooper Gal.). Benglis became best known for her continual questioning of the traditional designations of the ‘feminine’ through her particular choice of unusual materials. It was not until the 1980s that a theoretical framework was established that confirmed the validity of her art and dismissed any uneasiness associated with the exuberant physicality, sensuality and decorative nature of her work. [Clair Joy. "Benglis, Lynda." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 3, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T007881.]
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