NEW YORK, NY.- Pace Gallery is presenting Lynda Benglis: An Alphabet of Forms, an exhibition of sculpture in cast bronze by the pioneering artist. Marking Bengliss first solo presentation with the gallery in New York, the exhibition brings together six new large scale works made over the past three years. Drawing on the artists influential, decades-long investigation into knotted forms, her bronzes evoke both the morphology and semiotics of the knot. Glistening and reflective, her new sculptures lend shape to feeling, harnessing the dreamlike qualities of liquidity and buoyancy to explore ever newer possibilities for expressing proprioception, the bodys ability to perceive its own position in space. In these works, Benglis ties together several threads of longstanding interest in her practice: the pleasures of gesture and materiality, the powers of memory, the poetics of gravity, and the matter of sensation itself. Bengliss new sculptures speak to the urgency of our physical bodies in a world increasingly dissolved in the ether of digital information, and the work reminds us that body remains a tactile thing.
Coiling, twisting, and snaking, Bengliss abstractions stretch upward while curling inward, frozen in suspended animation. The underlying forms in her new work began as small clay sculptures that she refers to as Elephant Necklaces. Working with clay allowed Benglis to develop a vocabulary or lexicon of formal possibilities. Reconstituted in bronzea process that has been part of her practice since 1974Bengliss new works transpose this alphabet of forms from the intimate scale of the hand to the heroic scale of the body. The resulting works continue to register the presence and pressure of Bengliss fingers at the moment of contact with the original material. With metallic patinas that transform their complex and undulating surfaces into luminous, distorted mirrorsdarkly reflecting their environments, each other, and viewer Bengliss works evoke nothing so much as congealed liquidities: waves, eddies, and whorls, taut and palpitating with potential energy, are frozen at the moment of crashing release.
Benglis has described her decision to enlarge her works in clay as way of utilizing new technology. Beginning with an emphatically elemental form, shaped directly by her own hands, she transforms it through a digital process into a large-scale work in bronze. To begin with forms born from clay is to celebrate the persistence of the tactility and plasticitythat which is of the hand and the fingers, as the artist has put it. These bronzes belong to a genealogy of sculptural forms that she has been developing, refining, and reworking over the course of her entire career. At the center is the figure of the knot, to which she has frequently returned. In Bengliss work, the knot is simultaneously a physical form, a conceptual matrix, and a cultural history. The knotted forms and congealed liquidities of Bengliss bronzes evoke the frozen gesture that critic Robert Pincus-Witten famously identified as the crux of her practice in the 1960s.
An ongoing exploration of knots, bows, pleats, and other modes of tying, tethering, and twisting cut through a major portion of Bengliss work. She has connected her interest in knots to the experience of crocheting with her grandmother, who was a central figure in her early life. Bengliss childhood memoriesnot just of experiences, but of sensationsconstitute primary material for the artist. Her works strive to explore how kinesthetic experience subsists in memory. A whole repertoire of sensory memories informs Bengliss new bronzes, which are not exactly knots per sein the literal sense of her iconic sparkle knots of the 1970sbut remain indelibly entangled with the wider genealogy of knots in her work.
Additionally, Bengliss work has long been concerned with the history of knots as a kind of alphabet. Many cultures have historically utilized knots for recording information or encoding meaning, from China to the Pacific Islands to South America, and specifically for Benglis, the Incan quipu device. She continues to draw inspiration from these sources. With reflective surfaces patinated to register viewers reflection as they circumnavigate the work, Bengliss sculptures acknowledge viewers own involvement in the construction of meaning. The works evoke the sensations of the artists own body and her lived experience, inviting viewers to share in traces of her past. Presented together as a series for the first time, these works define a new chapter in Bengliss careerone that continues to push the boundaries of what is possible with sculpture.
This presentation runs concurrent with the artists solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., on view May December 2021, featuring sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints, and videos by the artist, drawn from the museums permanent collection. It also comes in advance of her solo exhibition at Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in 2022. In September 2021, Phaidon will release a new monograph on Benglis which will highlight this new body of work alongside her larger oeuvre.
Since the 1960s, Lynda Benglis (b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana) has been celebrated for the free, ecstatic forms she has made that are simultaneously playful and visceral, organic and abstract. Benglis began her career in the midst of Postminimal art and has pushed the traditions of painting and sculpture into new territories throughout her career. Comprised of a variety of materialsfrom beeswax, latex, and polyurethane foam to later innovations with plaster, gold, vaporized metals, glass, ceramics, and paperher works demonstrate an enduring fascination with process. The embrace of flowing forms, color, and sensual surfaces attests to her inventive and radical spirit. Bengliss experimental videos expand her interest of process to new media, featuring performative actions and using technological mediation to explore themes of physical presence, narcissism, sexuality, and gendered identity. Through her multifarious practice, Benglis continues a long-running investigation of the proprioceptive, sensory experiences of making and viewing her works.