Lynda Benglis - Andrew Bonacina

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Résumé :
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.

Biographie:
Interview : Andrew Bonacina is the Chief Curator of The Hepworth Wakefield in England. He is a former curator at the International Project Space in Birmingham. Before that, as Director and founder of the non-profit curatorial organization The Island, he curated projects at The Clocktower Gallery in New York, Whitstable Biennial 2012 and Art Dubai Special Projects (UAE). He is also Curator at the Monsoon Art Collection in London, and has written on contemporary art for Frieze and Mousse. Survey : Bibiana Obler is an Associate Professor of Art History at George Washington University, Washington DC. Her research and teaching interests include European and American art from the late nineteenth century to the present, with emphases on twentieth-century avant-gardes, theories of gender and cross-cultural representation, photography, applied arts, and intellectual history. She is also a member of the editorial collective of the journal Feminist Studies. Focus : Nora Lawrence is Artistic Director and Chief Curator at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, where she organized the exhibition Lynda Denglis. Water Sources (2015) Prior to joining Storm King, Ms. Lawrence was a curatorial assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has also worked at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York City She has authored and co-authored several publications, and has taught courses at MoMA, the School of Visual Arts, and the University of Southern California.

Sommaire:
Lynda Benglis (born 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana, lives and works in New York) is an artist who was first recognized in the late 1960s with her poured latex and foam works. Benglis's work created a perfectly timed retort to the male dominated fusion of painting and sculpture with the advent of Process Art and Minimalism. Known for her exploration of metaphorical and biomorphic shapes, she is deeply concerned with the physicality of form and how it affects the viewer, using a wide range of materials to render dynamic impressions of mass and surface: soft becomes hard, hard becomes soft and gestures are frozen. Benglis was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among other commendations. Her work is in some of the most important public collections, including: Guggenheim Museum...