The Hepworth Wakefield presented the UK’s first museum survey of work by Greek-American artist and feminist icon Lynda Benglis. This highly anticipated exhibition was the largest presentation of Benglis’ work in the UK, featuring approximately 50 works that spanned the entirety of her prolific career to date.
Aged 73, Benglis is one of America’s most significant living artists. Born in 1941 in Louisiana, USA, she was heralded as the ‘heir to Pollock’ by Life magazine in 1970, and emerged as part of a generation of artists forging new approaches to sculpture and painting in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art.
Counting Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt and Barnett Newman among her friends and peers, Benglis established her career within a male-dominated art world and became famous not only for her radical re-envisioning of sculpture and painting through her early works using wax and poured latex, but also for her works dealing with feminist politics and self-image.
‘Her retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield is a revelation.’ ****
Adrian Searle, The Guardian
‘Nothing is ever really as it seems: fanned metal seems weightless and fragile: enormous billowing piles of lead seem kinetic; and the artist herself seems to be constantly challenging us to create our own meanings regarding abstract forms.’
It’s Nice That
