We are very pleased with the article on Lynda Benglis and her oeuvre, written by Hermione Hoby, published in Frieze Magazine this March. Click here to read the full article on their website.
"Benglis has yoked a childlike vision – that numinous, instinctual talent for colour and form – to a deep, interrogative engagement with art history. In so doing, she has proved one of the most ground-breaking artists of her generation. Her famous ‘Fallen Paintings’ of the late 1960s, in which paint seems to have slipped from the bounds of the canvas and taken three-dimensional form on the floor, are both rebuke and homage to abstract expressionism; a one-upwomanship of Jackson Pollock’s celebrated drip technique, they merge wry wit with bold aesthetic delight. Benglis was a pioneer in the realm of video art, too, with performance-based works like Female Sensibility (1973), in which she kisses her friend Marilyn Lenkowsky, and Now (1973), in which she interacts with a pre-recorded image of herself and poses questions like: ‘Do you wish to direct me?’ These works, combined with the early 1970s photographs she referred to as ‘Sexual Mockeries’ (self-portraits featuring a pastiche of porn and pin-up iconography), have cast her as a feminist lodestar."
Image: Lynda Benglis painting the floor with 40 gallons of pigmented latex, University of Rhode Island, 1969. Photograph: Henry Groskinsky
