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LYNDA BENGLIS American artist Lynda Benglis first gained widespread critical attention during the turbulent 1970s when feminist politics and conceptual concerns were transforming the art scene. Initially trained as a painter, her artistic inclinations evolved and she began to the use unorthodox materials and methods that obscured distinctions between painting and sculpture. She poured pigmented latex rubber to create works such as Fallen Painting, 1968, and other elaborate installations of wall-mounted armatures covered with poured polyurethane foam. She experimented with wax, glass, various metals, gold leaf, and even neon in artworks that defy easy critical or historical classification. Color Ritual, 1971, is from this pivotal early period in Benglis’ career when she began experimenting with wax, latex, and polyurethane foam – materials she was drawn to for their life-like and malleable qualities. She found that they were well suited to her artistic ideas about process, the body, surface, and form. Benglis began working with encaustic (beeswax and pigment) in 1965. Three years later, she started a series of lozenge paintings of which this work is an excellent example. Using a support that was approximately the length of her arm, Benglis built up layers of colored wax that she applied hot, allowing it to drip and coagulate as it cooled. The craggy, intricate, and fragile surfaces that resulted look like forms in nature – a miniature landscape of deep valleys and rock formations, or the growth patterns of some strange fungus. For Benglis, however, these works were also about the human body – male and female, oral and genital. Her embrace of the accidental nature of working in hot wax was an essential aspect of her process-oriented work, but she said: “The process was transformed by the image. I have always been interested in imagery.” - Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects |