Lynda Benglis

Benglis began her career in the midst of Postminimal art and has pushed the traditions of painting and sculpture into new territories throughout her career. Comprised of a variety of materials – from beeswax, latex, and polyurethane foam to later innovations with plaster, gold, vaporized metals, glass, ceramics, and paper – her works demonstrate an enduring fascination with process. The embrace of flowing forms, colour, and sensual surfaces attests to her inventive and radical spirit. Benglis’s experimental videos expand her interest of process to new media, featuring performative actions and using technological mediation to explore themes of physical presence, narcissism, sexuality, and gendered identity. Through her multifarious practice, Benglis continues a long-running investigation of the proprioceptive, sensory experiences of making and viewing her works.

Works by Benglis are held by major public collections, including The Art Institute of Chicago; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Jewish Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, London; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Benglis was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1975, an Australian Art Council Award in 1976, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, in 1979 and 1990. In 2011, The College Art Association conferred the Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement on Benglis and in 2012 she was inducted as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2014, she was honoured at the New Museum Gala and at the Art Basel Miami Beach Women in the Arts. In 2017, Benglis received the International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement Award, in 2018, she received The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation Grant-Award, and in 2019, she was an Honoree at the Storm King Art Center Gala. In 2022, Benglis was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award, Women’s Caucus for Art in New York. She holds honorary degrees from Tulane University and the University of Thessaloniki in Greece.