Lynda Benglis: Sparkle Plenty: ADAA: The Art Show

For the ADAA’s The Art Show, Cheim & Read is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Lynda Benglis. The title of the new series, Sparkle Plenty, comes from the name of a character in the Dick Tracy comic strip.

Since the 1960s, Benglis (b. 1941) has been celebrated for the free, ecstatic forms she has poured, thrown and molded in ceramic, latex, polyurethane and bronze. In these new works she turns to handmade paper, which she wraps around a chicken wire armature, often painting the sand-toned surface in bright, metallic colors. Simultaneously playful and visceral, the new works enter into a lively dialogue with Benglis’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’s shell and a repository of the artist’s touch. The sculptures are light and open, with slits and apertures revealing their wire supports. Benglis has said, “I’m drawing with air, and wire, and paper.”

Her work is held in extensive public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.