Lynda Benglis
In the Realm of the Senses

Across a span that covers half a century –from 1969 onwards– the thirty-six sculptures in this concise retrospective displayed Benglis’s diverse imagery, ideas and methods. The show also presented three key ancient artefacts generously lent by the Museum of Cycladic Art itself.

Benglis’s distinctive materials include beeswax, bronze, aluminium, latex, ceramics, paper, fabrics and glass. Her stylistic repertoire encompasses the iconic early ‘fallen paintings’, ‘knots’, ‘lagniappes’, ‘torsos’, ‘pleats’ and ‘fountains’. Throughout, the selection stresses visual conversations, as it were, between textures (liquid-looking, delicate, strongly metallic, and so forth), color (gold’s uniform glow versus the multi-hued papers layered over wire armatures) and orientation (flowing horizontals that oppose totemic verticals). Often, a sense of sparse solemnity mingles with a deliberate, almost gaudy playfulness. Thus Benglis ever defies conventional boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ aesthetic categories.

In the Realm of the Senses celebrated a maverick artist who began her career as a female pioneer of Post-Minimalism in the late 1960s and still works with joyous freedom in the twenty-first century. Describing Benglis’s first wax reliefs, as early as 1968 a New York critic noted that “skin, pull, sensuousness” ranked among her primary concerns. Such intense corporeal sensations continue into the present – as Benglis’s achievement constantly shifts between fixity and movement, nature and flesh, surfaces and interiors, with a virtuosity both graceful and bold.