$55,000
Estimate: $60,000 - $100,000
18 Works from the Bachman Collection
Auction: June 4, 2018 1:00:00 PM EDT
Stainless steel wire mesh and copper.
Executed 1987-1988.
76 x 74 x 17 in. (193 x 188 x 43.2cm)
Provenance: The Artist.
Heath Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia.
The Estate of Lee & Gilbert Bachman, Atlanta, Georgia & Boca Raton, Florida (acquired directly from the above in 1993).
NOTE:
This lot is accompanied by a photocopy of the bill of sale from Heath Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia.
Born and raised in Louisiana, Lynda Benglis moved to New York in 1964. There she met influential artists such as Eva Hesse, Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, and Donald Judd. Influenced by Abstract Expressionism, she was particularly interested in the process by and through which her art took its final structure. Using a wide array of materials in vivid colors, her most well-known works are those that document the action and fluidity of substances in transitions of form. In order to accomplish this, she employed malleable and pliable substances, allowing the process of making the artwork dictate its final outcome. In the wake of Process Art and Minimalism and the male-dominated amalgam of sculpture and painting, Benglis' work was a well timed repartee. Benglis' "pours" were an expression of both painting and sculpture in one format. Stretching and pushing the conventions of painting, she used materials like latex and wax to both extend and comment on Jackson Pollock's drip painting technique in three dimensions. Her sculptures were also made from varied media such as metal and foam. The artist said of her own oeuvre, "My work is an expression of space. What is the experience of moving? Is it pictorial? Is it an object? Is it a feeling? It all comes from my body" (Benglis as quoted in Tracy Zwick, "Dancing With Clay: An Interview with Lynda Benglis," Art In America, 2014).
Throughout her career Benglis has also commented on feminism and the role of the female artist, manifested in videos and self portraits. Referring to Benglis' retrospective in 2011, Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times, "Whether you have been watching Ms. Benglis' varied career for decades or know her primarily from the latex pieces and her star turn in Artforum, this exhibition pulls together and elaborates her remarkable career in a thrilling way. It proves her work to be at once all over the place and very much of a piece, as well as consistently, irrepressibly ahead of its time. This would seem to be every renegade artist's dream" (R. Smith, "Artful Commentary, Oozing from the Walls," New York Times, 2011).
Benglis has won two National Endowment for the Arts grants as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work is featured in a number of public, private, and corporate collections including the Whitney Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.