Lynda Benglis Creates Sensory Illusions

Known for her alchemical handling of materials such as poured latex, knotted metal and sculpted wax, Lynda Benglis – whose new, self-titled show at Thomas Dane Gallery presents a collection of works being exhibited together in London for the first time – seems to freeze motion into visceral shapes that act against themselves.

On entering the gallery, viewers are confronted by a hot-pink ovoid swelling on the back wall. From a series of three made in 2017, Peitho exerts a curious fascination, honouring its namesake: the Greek goddess of persuasion. The two other works from the series, Thetis and Luck, glow on opposite walls in fluorescent yellow and green, respectively. I wanted to sink my fingers into their pulsing and viscid surfaces. The polyurethane cast creates a sensory illusion, indicative of how Benglis often uses hard substances playfully to mimic soft or fluid materials.

The works exalt flow and extrusion over the geometric neatness of her early contemporaries, such as Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt. Yet, they bear traces, in their blemished surfaces and switches in scale, of a highly stylized construction process in which the artist creates casts of liquid materials in solid bronze and plastic.

B-Witched (2022), an Everdur bronze form, gleams on the gallery floor. From one angle, it resembles the lower half of a human torso; from another, it’s molten metal caught mid-pour, dented with strange globs and crenelations. At certain points, we see the imprint of the artist’s hand, indicating how a seemingly organic occurrence is, in fact, carefully laboured. Elsewhere, Figure 1 (2009) – a bumpy tusk of bronze with a jet-black patina – curves outwards from an adjacent wall like hardened lava, artificially reshaped.

The exhibition’s centrepiece is a pair of metallic works. Elephant: First Foot Forward (2018) and Power Tower (2019) echo each other in form as they corkscrew upwards from the gallery floor, twisting, looping and folding in on themselves. The larger of the pieces, Power Tower, resembles the hollow of an ancient tree, so monolithic and hulking that you could almost climb inside. As my eye roves over the ridges and pleated edges of the white tombasil bronze, the act of looking becomes a kind of caress. 

Positioned lower to the ground, Elephant: First Foot Forward is more tubular, like the bell of an avant-garde trombone. Starting life as ceramic sculptures, both these works were blown up in scale by Benglis using a form of 3D printing, before being cast in bronze and polished to a glittering shine. Their strange quiddity bends perception, deceiving your eye as you move around them.

The gallery space serves to intensify the works’ interrelated effects. The neighbouring, egg-like sculptures, for instance, cause pink and yellow to bloom upon the bronze works’ burnished surfaces. Benglis seems to suggest that, for all our apparent individuation, each of us is an offshoot from the same physical stuff, impossibly enmeshed. Here, none of the sculptures can be viewed in isolation but, rather, within some larger process of iteration.

Finally, the eye hits a matt-black formation in the right-hand corner of the room. At first, it almost looks like burnt rubber: a melted tyre from a roadside accident. Yet, on closer inspection, Black Widow (2021) morphs into an expressive gesture: a lick of paint squirted from a giant tube. Again cast from Everdur bronze, the work is marked by traces of the vessel from which its maquette was ejected. Its etched grooves and ragged edges retain the method of its coming into being. As with all works in this show, form becomes flux with no entirely fixed beginning or end – a conductor of restless feeling, always ready to change into something else.

Lynda Benglis is at Thomas Dane Gallery, London, until 29 April

^{Main image: Lynda Benglis, Peitho (detail), 2017, cast pigmented polyurethane, 130 × 89 × 43 cm. Courtesy: © the artist, Pace Gallery, Thomas Dane Gallery and VAGA at Artists Rights Society, NY}