NEW YORK.- Artist Gretchen Bender, 53, died. Gretchen Bender was born in Seaford, Delaware. She studied fine arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her first gallery show took place at the Nature Morte Gallery in the East Village in New York in 1983. The Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse held a midcareer retrospective in 1991. She is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Bender has also directed commercials for American television. She began an artistic collaboration with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1984 with the premiere of Freedom of Information at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris. In 1990, she created and directed a 16mm surrealistic film for the dream sequence in the company's production of Mother of Three Sons.