Galerie Michael Janssen is pleased to announce Wax’in Wane, an exhibition of recent works by American artist Lynda Benglis, including wax works on wood and paper and freestanding non-objective sculptural forms called The Manu. The gallery has first presented Lynda Benglis in a solo exhibition in November 1997 in its former gallery in Cologne.
Born in Louisiana in 1941 and with a career spanning over 40 years, Benglis has worked in mediums as varied as bronze, glass, neon light, ceramics, wax, liquid latex, polyurethane, plaster as well as photography and video. Deeply concerned with the physicality of form Benglis chooses materials for both their cultural associations and formal properties. Questioning
the rigours of Modernism and Minimalism by merging content and form, Benglis’ foremost concern is the pictorial element.
Invigorating her abstract forms with anthropomorphic, feminist and naturalistic references, she is an image-maker seeking to share an excess of associations that rouse both our physical and emotional senses. Her influence today is felt amongst a new generation of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Polly Apfelbaum and Matthew Barney.
In her work, the act of artistic creation is embedded in presentation of process and the movement of materials. Benglis arrests the viewer through her use of materials, forging them into new states, pushing their properties to the very limit and creating undiscovered means of expression.
Benglis moved to New York in the late 1960’s, just after Minimalism had reached its zenith. In the 1970’s she collaborated with Robert Morris for several projects and had a meteoric career. Benglis plays a central position in the pluralistic art of the ‘70s and she was featured in a 1974 Life Magazine article as the heir to Pollock. In a flamboyant Artforum Magazine ad from 1974 she poses nude wearing sunglasses and holding an outsized plastic dildo to make a raucous joke of the ostensible self-sufficient minimalist artist and object alike.
Lynda Benglis divides her time between New York and Santa Fe. Her numerous awards and honours include a Guggenheim
Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants. She is currently the subject of a travelling retrospective exhibition which started at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and went on to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin and to Le Consortium in Dijon. In the beginning of 2011 it will have its final stops at the Museum of Art in Rhode Island and at the New Museum in New York.