Lynda Benglis

b. 1941

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Lynda Benglis, Contraband, 1969. Pigmented latex, 3 × 116 1/4 × 398 1/4 in. (7.6 × 295.3 × 1011.6 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee and partial gift of John Cheim and Howard Read 2008.14

Art © Lynda Benglis / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

Lynda Benglis is interested in questioning what art can be. Since the 1960s, she has been pushing the boundaries of sculpture through her experiments with various materials—from beeswax to polyurethane. Benglis has made paintings that lie on the floor (like this one), and sculptures that hang on the wall.

About the artist

Lynda Benglis was born in 1941 and grew up in Louisiana. She went to Newcomb College in New Orleans, where she first studied philosophy and then painting and ceramics. In 1964, Benglis moved to New York to study at the Brooklyn Museum Art School. She first made tall, narrow paintings with colored wax, then in 1969, Benglis began to experiment with large-scale sculpture and pouring latex (a type of liquid rubber) or foam that she mixed with pigments.

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Lynda Benglis talks about the clothes she likes to wear when she works, what she wanted to be when she was a kid, and her artistic process.

materials

Pigments

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“I still think of myself as a painter for some reason. I think I’m painting with liquids but making objects that are dimensional, that have a sense of their own space, but demand some viewing in terms of walking around. To me, it was always a situation of making your own material in order to work.”

—Lynda Benglis

Lynda Benglis

b. 1941

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