In four decades of abstract art practice, Lynda Benglis has not merely
challenged the status quo. She has tied it in knots, melted it down and
poured it across the floor, cast it in glass, clay and bronze. Daring
and sometimes outrageous, her intense and provocative practice has
produced some of the most iconic pieces of art from the late twentieth
century. Richmond gives serious critical attention to work often
dismissed as trivial and rootless, recovering the themes that link the
different phases of the artist's quest to capture the 'frozen gesture'.
Whether challenging popular tastes and definitions of art with her 1970s
abstract knotwork or mocking puritanical aesthetics of gender with her
colourful latex pourings and their allusions to corporeal topographies,
Benglis never failed to provoke. Her sculptures commemorate and
celebrate the processes of creation themselves, combining architectonic
abstraction and feminized sensuality in a haunting, visceral theme of
the strangeness of the body that runs through all her experiments in
glass, video, metals, ceramics, gold leaf, paper and plastics.
Lynda Benglis: Beyond Process examines in depth the work and critical
neglect of an artist who, perhaps more than any of her contemporaries,
changed the face of American art in the 1960s and 1970s, and continues
to fetishise, provoke and demand your attention.
