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Bronze Crustaceans and Giant 'Pink Lady' Sculptures Go on Display at Storm King

Lynda Benglis’ outdoor sculptures take on organic configurations at Storm King.
Lynda Benglis, Hills and Clouds, 2014. Images by the author

Dressed in denim with her gray hair pulled back and big round sunglasses, the artist Lynda Benglis was in her element two Saturday afternoons ago. At the opening of her new exhibition Water Sources at Storm King in New Windsor, New York, where she’s showing alongside Luke Stettner's Outlooks, she danced around the green lawns talking about her sculptures to fellow artists, to Storm King members, and to The Creators Project.

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What was scheduled to be a rainy day cleared quickly, illuminating Benglis’s 10 outdoor sculptures placed throughout fields, hills, and woodlands within the 500-acre Storm King complex, alongside permanent pieces by legendary artists such as Alexander Calder, Richard Serra, and Isamu Noguchi. Benglis’s pieces of monumental size and tactile surface take the forms of fountains and forts, dating back to 1974. Water Sources extends itself to the corners of Storm King, with smaller sculptural pieces on display inside the six galleries in Storm King’s Museum Building, and Benglis’s newer large-scale pieces occupying the front of the museum and the surrounding landscape.

Lynda Benglis is without a doubt one of America’s most famous female artists. First recognized in the late 60s during the height of both a male-dominated minimalist movement and second-wave Feminism, she became known early on for her latex and foam works, as well as her November 1974 "centerfold" ad in Artforum. Throughout her career, she's abstractly played with organic forms by revealing their biomorphic shapes and natural formations. In many of her works at Storm King, fingerprints and impressions are visible, illustrating the process of what was once soft and malleable is now hard and stoic.

Running contrary to much contemporary art, Benglis’s body of work does not require outside references or prior knowledge to understand. Beyond representations of news stories, conceptual theories, and aesthetics, they're standalone works of art left up to viewers' interpretations. At the opening, Benglis shared with us her thoughts on the processes and productions behind her Water Sources exhibition.

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Lynda Benglis, Bounty, Fruited Plane, and Amber Waves, 2014

The Creators Project: How long have you been preparing for this show?

Lynda Benglis: Only six months, but I’ve been working on all of the pieces for a while. I had them in terms of ideas, and I decided that I was going to put them together. I was working on the mother and child with the World’s Fair piece [Crescendo] as well as the North South East West piece.

Lynda Benglis, Cloak-Wave Pedmarks and Migrating Pedmarks, 1998

Could you talk more about the Crescendo piece? Were these all made at the same time?

They were each done separately in a different foundry. This was the World’s Fair winner [The wave in Crescendo], and then I added different things to it. I saw these in Dijon, France and they have this French patina, which is so nice, these sculptures in front are like a little mother and child.

Lynda Benglis, Crescendo, 2015

Could you talk more about the foundry you worked with to create these pieces?

The foundry is called the Modern Art Foundry. I’ve worked with them since the early 1980s. They do quality work, I tell them, “make it be natural, make it be what it is” and they do it, and I can tell you, they make some beautiful work.

Lynda talking about her work in front of Crescendo, 2015

How intentional are you when it comes to actual pouring and gestures behind the bronze pieces?

Well, you know, once you put paint on the brush, you move the brush and you draw with it. It is abstract. If I’m not drawing a hippopotamus, like I might’ve been doing over there, or thinking about other kinds of beasts, in this case I was doing a kind of Rococo thing [Referring to the North South East West piece]. [Referring to the 'mother and child' in the Crescendo piece] This is more slow, more Baroque, this is the contrapposto, the twist of the torso; this is more more animalistic or animated in the sense. I thought of these of dancers on the surface, like corpuses.

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Lynda Benglis, North South East West, 2009

As a viewer, how am I supposed to look at these pieces?

They are always delicate, but they are configurative. I use that word configurative, because configuration is very important. To let the mind read in, the way you read in the clouds and tree formations, you read into your subject. When you read into your subject, you have a kind of reference in how you relate to what you believe you see. So, this is open.

Close-up of North South East West, 2009

Could you talk more about the North South East West piece?

I made them from what I had leftover in my studio out in East Hampton. I did the cantilever form first and after that, I looked at it and did three others.

They almost look like little insects. 

Yes, exactly. They’re animated with the dripping. All of these forms came about afterwards.

Lynda Benglis, Pink Ladies, 2014

These tall cone forms seem different than a lot of your other work, could you speak more about them?

That’s a kind of cornucopia. I called the first one Bounty, then Waves of Grain, and then the next one Fruited Plane; fruited because you see the fruit coming out of the cornucopia, in other words, the water is also the fruit, because its the water that makes the fruit. I made this in an area where there is the biggest wheat export—they export to China— in a small town called Walla Walla and I made it at the Walla Walla Foundry.

And for the Pink Ladies, why did you decide to do it in pink and in a polyurethane material instead of bronze like Bounty?

I didn’t make it in bronze because of the height, its almost human scale. It was very important that you can see through them, that they have that lightness with the translucency.

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Yeah, it’s amazing color contrast. 

They're are nice against the green, aren’t they?

Definitely.

See Lynda Benglis’s Water Sources at Storm King through November 8th, 2015. Click here to learn more.

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