Steaming Piles of Polyurethane: This is Why I Love Lynda

Often overlooked, always avant-garde, artist Lynda Benglis began her career in New York as a painter at the height of the minimalist movement. In 1968, she began creating her “Fallen Paintings” by pouring latex directly onto the floor. Now, 40 years later, just steps from the studio at 222 Bowery she has occupied since the 70’s, the most iconic piece from this creative period, Contraband, is on display in the lobby of the New Museum.

Image courtesy of the New Museum

The sculptural work for which Benglis is most well known, and the anchor of this retrospective, is minimalist in medium (polyurethane, wax, aluminum etc.) but executed in an abstract expressionist style. It’s easy to see Jackson Pollack’s influence in her pieces; the pigmented latex being applied to the floor the same way Pollack dripped house paint on canvas to create his iconic action paintings 20 years prior.

These pieces were also Benglis’s first attempts to disrupt the male dominated minimalist movement. Experimentation with photography and film and heightened feelings of underrepresentation led Benglis to take out an advertisement(NSFW!) in Artforum in 1974, where she posed nude with an extra large, lifelike latex dildo between her legs. Although the advertisement is now viewed as an important statement on gender in contemporary art, it brought Benglis much criticism from the feminist community (her creative insecurities led to this over-the-top gesture). A number of Benglis’s pieces that challenge sexuality and gender are the highlights of this show.

However significant her work has been to contemporary art on a conceptual level, Benglis’s pieces are most importantly exciting, comical and fun to engage with. Benglis created Phantom in 1971 by making amateurs of chicken wire covered in plastic and then by pouring phosphorescent polyurethane over them. The glow-in-the-dark figures appear to be emerging from the wall, the finger tips of a monster slowly transitioning into this dimension. Authors note – DO NOT SMOKE WEED IMMEDIATELY BEFORE SEEING THIS SHOW!

Image courtesy of the New Museum

Lynda Benglis was organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Le Consortium, Dijon; The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and the New Museum, New York. The exhibition is on view at the New Museum until June 19. For more information go here.

Editorial Disclaimer: The author of this post received discounted or complementary admission to the above mentioned exhibition, courtesy of the host institution, organization or gallery.