(MADRID).- For the first time ever, Banca March has brought the works of US artist Lynda Benglis to Spain, showcasing four sculpture fountains in the bank’s Madrid gardens. Since the end of February to June 2024, Banca March’s gardens in Madrid has been setting the scene for four monumental artworks by the creator Lynda Benglis. This is the first time that the work of this leading 20th and 21st century US sculptor has been displayed in Spain. In 1970, Life magazine lauded her as the heir to Jackson Pollock and in 2022 she was selected by The New York Times for its special issue The Greats, which celebrates four “inimitable artists whose talents have cemented their place in culture” every year. At 82 years old, six decades after she started work, Lynda is still creating.

“I’ve always wanted to make fountains. Growing up on a lake, near the water, was what made me want to work with water and its movement (...) The water flows over and around them. They are like eruptions that spring from the earth, and the water articulates that explosive character. This is something that is felt in the body, the pull of gravity. I’ve always been very aware of this, and it manifests itself in my work, probably in all my work, in one way or another,” said the artist. This work is now on display at an installation entitled Lynda Benglis Fuentes Jardín Banca March.

Banca March’s unwavering commitment to culture and art is evident in this four-piece installation by Lynda Benglis, designed in partnership with Vande, a global firm specialising in the private sale of works of art and cultural productions and focused around the idea of fountains and water as evocative symbols of the concept of sustainability. Since it was founded in 1926, Banca March has remained utterly committed to generating a positive impact on its surroundings and contributing to the development of society. Banca March is committed to delivering both economic and social value in a way which is both environmentally friendly and sustainable over time, underpinned by a unique business model based on shared growth for customers, employees, shareholders and society as a whole.

With its hundred-year anniversary just around the corner in 2026, Banca March is set to open the gardens of its Madrid headquarters two days a week until June. During this time, visitors can have the chance to enjoy these four fountains, which are distributed around the Banca March gardens, a haven of green nestling in the shade of an early twentieth century landmark building in Madrid’s Salamanca neighbourhood.

Banca March CEO José Luis Acea said: “Exhibiting Lynda Benglis’ sculptures in the Banca March gardens holds great meaning for us and makes perfect sense. Both the idea of the exhibition and the philosophy of the US artist align perfectly with our banking and business philosophy. Banca March is Spain’s most solvent bank, specialising in private banking and advisory services for investors, companies and business families, with a business model that focuses on far more than simply generating financial profits. Since its inception almost 100 years ago, Banca March has remained faithful to its commitment to shared growth with customers, employees, shareholders and society in general. Our roots are in the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, so the sea, water, and the vital need for its conservation are woven into our DNA. This was evidenced back in 2019 when we created Mediterranean Fund,
an investment fund designed to combine sustainability and returns, which invests in the oceans as a source of wealth and in water as a scarce, indispensable resource to be conserved. As the only bank in the Spanish financial system which has been wholly family-owned bank since its creation, we are determined to respond effectively and responsibly to the changes demanded by society, with a long-term approach, to ensure we build a better world for future generations.”

Regarding the importance of Lynda Benglis’ work, Anne Pontégnie, who curated the exhibition alongside Vande, said: “Lynda Benglis is a colossal figure in contemporary sculpture. Her work can be interpreted as a constant effort to capture movement, an attempt to freeze and express the flow, the embodiment of life.”

Celebrating water

“A sculpture should be able to do something with itself; to have a voice. A good piece should never stop raising questions” (2).

Lynda Benglis created her first fountain in 1984 for the Louisiana World Exposition and called it The Wave of the World. The work was also her first time working with bronze. For years this fountain was thought to be lost, until it appeared in an old wastewater treatment plant in the city of Kenner, just over 20 kilometres from where it was installed. It was restored by the artist herself, who modified the piece to create Crescendo (1983-84/2014-15), which is one of the pieces that is being displayed in Banca March’s gardens. This megalith practically comes alive to welcome visitors as they stroll through the grounds and discover the bank’s gardens.

Another of the sculptures, Knight Mer (2007-22), is a smaller-format fountain which is reminiscent of the crustaceans and life forms encountered by Lynda Benglis in the swamps of her native Louisiana.

Bounty, Amber Waves and Fruited Plane (2021) are three columns comprised of stacked conical vessels which channel the flow of the water. Perhaps one of the best-known and most reproduced sculptural ensembles by Benglis, these three columns are monumental in size, towering almost eight metres high.

The final piece in the exhibition is Pink Lady (2014), the only fountain made of polyurethane; shocking fluorescent pink in colour, its rough surface evokes the piles of sand and mud expelled by crabs and crustaceans on the seashore. Benglis has spoken about this specifically: “The holes the crabs made were very important to me (...) Watching the flood waters, I saw how they extracted the mud and left large holes, sometimes thirty centimetres high, covered with bubbling mud. They had texture, it was very romantic.” (3)

On the origin and concept of the exhibition, Vande said: “We are all familiar with Banca March’s commitment to art and culture as part of its almost century-old philosophy of shared growth with society. The choice of these
four monumental fountains by Lynda Benglis was fairly simple. The exoticism of their forms establish a fruitful dialogue with the plant life around them. The beauty of these fountains has ensured that these and Benglis’ other pieces are seared on the retina of everyone who has seen them. Bringing them to Madrid allows the public to appreciate them in all their fullness and nuances, particularly in relation to the landscape, water and the importance of sustaining and preserving the world around us.”

Lynda Benglis

In 1970, Life magazine hailed Lynda Benglis as the heir to Pollock. She was 29 years old. She had been in New York, the new art capital, for six years, and held 15 solo exhibitions. Despite her dizzying ascent to fame, she has not perhaps achieved the same recognition as peers like Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Richard Serra or Frank Stella.

Born in 1941 in Lake Charles, Louisiana, USA, Benglis’ Greek father ran a building materials warehouse and her mother, a seamstress, was an amateur painter. She was the eldest of five children. She majored in painting at Newcomb College in New Orleans.

In 1964 she moved to New York and enrolled in the Brooklyn Museum Art School, which has now disappeared. Initially, she explored abstract expressionism, butquestioned the rigidity of the medium. In a conversation with artist John Baldessari published in Interview magazine in 2015, Baldessari confesses that when he first saw her work he thought: “You don’t have to have a stretcher bar to do a painting.” Later she became a pioneer in working with industrial materials. In Benglis’ own words: “I wasn’t breaking away from painting, I was trying to redefine what it was.”

She created “pours”, which brought artworks off the walls and took the Pollock-style drip technique to three dimensions, spilling liquid latex directly onto the floor. Her work makes the overwhelming gesture of expressionism ingenious and the rigidity of minimalism subversive. She was also a pioneer in working with video, questioning the role of the female artist, and caused scandals with self-portraits where she posed as a pin-up girl or porn star.

Artists as diverse as Cindy Sherman and Rachel Harrison later followed in her footsteps.

In 1969, the Whitney Museum commissioned a 10-metre latex pour, Contraband, for the exhibition Anti-Illusion, a gathering of post-minimalists. Her colleagues complained about the colour of the piece, and the curator of the exhibition offered to place it near an access ramp, off to one side. Benglis declined to participate and took her piece home. At that time she was focusing on her frozen gestures; she built these by pouring polyethylene foam from a ladder onto wooden structures and chicken wire. When the wires are removed, ghostly shapes areleft behind that appear to jump out of the walls. In 1971, six of these giant installations went on a tour of the country. Other versions of these gestures were made in wax, which when hot-brushed in two directions creates, upon cooling, a peculiar, jagged topography. In the same vein, her sculptures also take the form of knots.

It was in November 1974 that she really hit the big time. Artforum, the biggest art magazine at the time, decided to run a feature on her work. Benglis wanted to publish a nude of herself on one of the opening pages of the article, but themagazine refused. Her response was to buy two pages of advertising space for $3,000: On the left, against a black background, the details of her gallery; on theopposite page, a photograph of the artist wearing only sunglasses and a seductive pose. It was intended as a wakeup call on sexist gender stereotypes in art and provoked such controversy in the industry that several journalists left the magazine in protest. According to The New York Times, the photograph is considered one of the most important works of pop art and feminist art of the 20th century. Dubbed Centrefold, it is perhaps, the most famous image ever published in an art magazine. An icon, but also an anomaly in Benglis’ career, characterised by more revolutionary, forceful pieces.

The following year, she was awarded the Guggenheim Prize. From 1975 to 2008 she continued to hold exhibitions – more than 70 in the US and world-wide – but her career failed to reach its previous heights. It wasn’t until 2009, the year of her first European retrospective at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, that she found herself once again in the spotlight. The exhibition travelled to Le Consortium in Dijon, France, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art in Providence, and the New Museum in New York.

Benglis currently splits her time between her studios in New York and Santa Fe, New Mexico. She continues to work with ceramics and polyurethane along with pieces in moulded paper. “If you think about each one of my works as a body,” Benglis told the curator of her exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield, Andrew Bonacina, “that body is always in motion.”

Banca March

Banca March is the parent company of one of Spain’s leading financial groups, and the only one which is wholly family owned. In line with its philosophy of prudent, long-term management, Banca March’s business model is supported by robust financial and capital ratios. The bank boasts the lowest NPL ratio in the Spanish financial sector (1.27% at the end of June, versus a sector average of 3.5%) and its capital adequacy ratio (19.61%), LCR (256.19%), DTL (137.93%) and NPL coverage ratio (74.92%) are also among the strongest in the sector. Banca March’s compelling value proposition has also been recognised by the rating agency Moody’s, which has raised the bank’s long-term rating to A2 with a stable outlook, positioning it as one of the best-rated banks in the Spanish financial sector and stronger than Spanish sovereign debt, which is currently rated Baa1. Banca March is one of the main shareholders in Corporación Financiera Alba, which holds significant stakes in Naturgy (indirect), Acerinox, Profand, Ebro Foods, Viscofan, Atlantic and Parques Reunidos, among other companies.