Book dossier

Lynda Benglis

by Lynda Benglis

"Since the 1960s, Lynda Benglis has been celebrated for the free, ecstatic forms she has poured, thrown and molded in ceramic, latex, polyurethane and bronze. In her new work she turns to handmade paper, which she wraps around a chicken wire armature, often painting the sand-toned surface in bright, metallic colors offset by strokes of deep, coal-based black. At other times she leaves the paper virtually bare. These works reflect the environment in which they were made, the ?sere and windblown? landscape of Santa Fe, New Mexico, as Princenthal writes in her essay. ?It is possible to see the bleached bones of the land{u2014}its mesas and arroyos; its scatterings of shed snakeskins and animal skeletons{u2014}in the new sculptures{u2019} combination of strength and delicacy.? Simultaneously playful and visceral, the new works enter into a lively dialogue with Benglis{u2019}s previous explorations of materials and form, but with a raw immediacy inherent to the moist strips of paper she uses as their skin. Stretched, crimped and torn into richly organic shapes, the paper becomes both the sculpture{u2019}s shell and a repository of the artist{u2019}s touch."--Gallery website.