Lynda Benglis
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands
20 June – 4 October 2009
IMMA, Dublin, Ireland
4 November 2009 – 24 January 2010
Le Consortium, Dijon, France
2 April – 20 June 2010
Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD),
Providence, USA
1 October 2010 – 9 January 2011
New Museum, New York, USA
9 February – 1 May 2011
This exhibition is the first solo exhibition in Europe of the American sculptor Lynda Benglis, best known for her ground-breaking work challenging accepted artistic norms through a pioneering merging of content and form. Comprising works from the 1960s to date, Lynda Benglis highlights the artist’s extraordinary creative output, which has defied prevailing views on the nature and function of art over 40 years.
Lynda Benglis’s interest in process has led her to expand the possibilities of material. Taking the body and landscape as prime references, she creates abstract works that oozes immediacy and physicality. Famously described as ‘frozen gestures’, many appear to a defy gravity. This exhibition represents her extraordinary creative output from her early poured latex or polyurethane sculptures, best known as ‘fallen paintings’ and wax reliefs of the late 1960s; videos, Torsos and Knots of the 1970s along with Wing (an incarnation of one of her cantilevered sculptures) and the 1975 installation Primary Structures (Paula’s Props); to her metallised pleated sculptures of the 1980s and 90s; and her more recent works in polyurethane such as The Graces, 2003-05.
A new work, North South East West, 2009, taking the form of a cast bronze fountain, is shown for the first time in the Formal Gardens at IMMA. The artist has been developing the idea of this hydraulic sculpture since her cantilevered installations of the early 1970s, now mostly destroyed. Her first fountain The Wave (The Wave of the World), 1983, was created for the World Fair in New Orleans.
Born in 1941 in Louisiana, USA, Lynda Benglis lives and works between New York, Santa Fe, Kastelorizo and Ahmedabad. Recent solo exhibitions include Lynda Benglis, Cheim & Read, New York, 2009; Shape Shifters, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2008; Lynda Benglis: Pleated, Knotted, Poured…, Locks Gallery, Philadelphia, 2007; Lynda Benglis: Sculptures, Bass Museum of Art, Miami, 2003. In 2007 Cheim & Read staged the critically acclaimed exhibition Circa 70: Lynda Benglis and Louise Bourgeois. Benglis has also exhibited widely in major group exhibitions including Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, Tate Modern, London, 2001; Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art from the 60s, Tate Liverpool, 2005; High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975, Independent Curators International, New York, 2007, and Lynda Benglis/Robert Morris: 1973-1974, Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, 2009.
The exhibition is organised by IMMA, Dublin, in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, and New Museum, New York.
A fully-illustrated hardcover monograph, produced by Les Presses du Réel, accompanies the exhibition. It comprises texts by Dave Hickey and Elisabeth Lebovici, and exhibition curators Franck Gautherot, Caroline Hancock, Laura Hoptman and Judith Tannenbaum, an interview with the artist conducted by curator Seungduk Kim, and an in-depth chronology compiled by curator Diana Franssen. Famous and unseen archival material (magazine articles, photographs, letters, installation shots) will be reproduced as well as an overview of Benglis’ work since the mid-1960s. Seminal articles published in Artforum magazine are reproduced: “The Frozen Gesture” by Robert Pincus-Witten (November 1974) and “Bone of Contention” by Richard Meyer (November 2004). www.lespressesdureel.com
Admission is free
Opening hours:
Tuesday – Saturday: 10.00am – 5.30pm
except Wednesday: 10.30am – 5.30pm
Sundays and Bank Holidays: 12noon – 5.30pm
Mondays, 24 – 26 Dec & 28 Dec: Closed
