Lynda Benglis

Biography

Lynda Benglis (b. 1941, Lake Charles, LA) lives and works in New York, NY; Santa Fe, NM; Kastellorizo, Greece; and Ahmedabad, India. First recognized in the late 1960s for her poured latex and foam works, Benglis created work that was a perfectly timed retort to the male-dominated fusion of painting and sculpture with the advent of Process Art and Minimalism. Known for her exploration of metaphorical and biomorphic shapes, she is deeply concerned with the physicality of form and how it affects the viewer, using a wide range of materials to render dynamic impressions of mass and surface: soft becomes hard, hard becomes soft, and gestures are frozen.

Benglis’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at major museums around the world, including the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2022); National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2021); Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, Greece (2019); Kistefos-Museet, Jevnaker, Norway (2018); Museo Internacional del Barroco, Puebla, Mexico (2016); Bergen Assembly, KODE Art Museums of Bergen, Norway (2016); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2016); Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK (2015); and Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, NY (2015). 

Benglis is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among other commendations. Her work is held in numerous public collections including Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, UK; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

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