Lynda Benglis: Defining Post-Minimalism, 1968–1990: Frieze Masters, Regent’s Park, London

Cheim & Read and Thomas Dane Gallery are pleased to announce a survey of important works by Lynda Benglis to be presented at Frieze Masters, Regent’s Park, London, October 5–8, 2017.

In the late 1960s, Benglis rejected the formalist precepts of Clement Greenberg and Donald Judd to produce a form of Post-minimalism paralleling Eva Hesse’s investigations into the emotional resonances of materials, but with an explicit sense of sexuality and Feminist revolt coupled with a freewheeling manipulation of media, from painting and sculpture to photography, film, and video. Her works in polyurethane foam, lead, aluminum, plaster, enamel, and glitter congealed in lumps on the floor or curled off the wall, while her sometimes tender, sometimes savage videos pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable as art. 

As Catherine J. Morris, the Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, writes in Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s (Prestel, 2016), Benglis created these works “to undermine — or at least thumb her nose at — what she saw as the reigning orthodoxies ruling both the artworld and the emergent second-wave feminist movement.” By breaking the boundaries of Minimalist “good taste,” Benglis opened up the floodgates of color, sex, politics, and humor, influencing a wide field of aesthetic endeavors, from the cool analysis of identity politics and appropriation art to the uninhibited exuberance of performance, Pattern and Decoration, and Neo-Expressionism.

As part of Frieze Talks, Lynda Benglis and Eike Schmidt (Director of the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence) will be in conversation on October 5 at 3:00 PM in Frieze Masters Auditorium.