BALTIMORE, MD.- Goya Contemporary Gallery is presenting a solo exhibition of post-minimalist, cult American artist, Lynda Benglis (b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana). This major survey of works ON and OF paper is the artist’s first in Baltimore.
Benglis broke through the 1960’s New York art scene with works of poured latex and foam in brash day-glow colors that were at once simple and complex; quickly establishing her position as a renegade, challenging the conventions and dogmatic primacy of Minimalism and Pop. The artist’s invention and bravatas drew attention almost immediately upon arriving in NY. In 1969, Benglis removed her work from an exhibition at the Whitney Museum due to curatorial strife as a consequence of hue selection within works slated for an “Anti-Illusion” exhibition. Benglis’ defiant nature was exemplified, again, by an iconic advertisement in the November 1974 edition of ArtForum, in which she posed naked brandishing a strategically placed dildo – satirizing machismo and commercial promotion of the art world.
Whether through day-glow drip poured latex , wax painting, cast paper torso forms, or video, Benglis’ innovation has always been rooted in the vernacular of gesture. For the last forty years, Benglis has continued to pursue her own idiosyncratic path, borrowing liberally from Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, Pop Art and Minimalism, while inventing new processes within painting and sculpture. Using a broad range of materials - polyeurethane, rubber, zinc, clay, bronze, gold, paper, glitter, etc. – Benglis has rendered objects as solid, tangible,”frozen gesture," and has created forms representing extensions of the body. Her parallel and equally radical work in video and photography explores gender relations, power structures, and artistic identity.
Lynda Benglis: Prints and Cast Paper from the 1970’s-2000’s at Goya Contemporary focuses on the artist’s career-long dialogue with paper. Goya’s Executive Director and exhibitions Curator, Amy Eva Raehse, explains: “I am particularly enthusiastic to exhibit Benglis’ provocative paper oeuvre which is at once vulnerable, eroticized, confident and defiant- paralleling the complexity of the work’s content and form, with the artist’s spirit of contradiction and experimentation. The show chronicles shifts in Benglis’ work, and simultaneously points to our own history as an institution grown from paper,and by women.” Raehse also points to the contribution of her colleague, Carl Solway, as well as Cheim & Read, in support of the exhibition.
Lynda Benglis continues to be hugely influential to younger generations interested in such varying ideas as feminism, performance, process driven art and the sacrosanct area of painting. A long-overdue retrospective of Benglis’ works was recently organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and has travelled to a number of partner museums in Europe and the US, including the New Museum in New York City.
Lynda Benglis shares her time between New York, India and Greece. The exhibition will be held in both gallery 1 and gallery 2 at Goya Contemporary through May 2 of 2012.
