Lynda Benglis American, b. 1941

Lynda Benglis is a pioneering American artist best known for her radical sculptural practice that challenged the formal limits of Minimalism and redefined the possibilities of postwar sculpture. Working across sculpture, installation, video, and photography since the late 1960s, Benglis has been a central figure in Post-Minimalism and feminist art, celebrated for her material experimentation and confrontational engagement with form, process, and power.

Born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Benglis studied at Newcomb College in New Orleans before moving to New York in the mid-1960s. There, she emerged in dialogue with Minimalist and Process Art practices, while actively resisting their austerity and impersonal ethos. Her early poured latex and polyurethane works—often cast directly onto the floor—introduced gravity, chance, and viscosity as compositional forces, collapsing distinctions between painting and sculpture and foregrounding material behavior.

Benglis’s sculptures are characterized by sensuous surfaces, organic contours, and a dynamic tension between control and excess. Whether working in rubber, foam, wax, metal, or ceramics, she consistently embraces tactility and physical presence. These works counter the rigidity of Minimalism with fluidity, color, and bodily association, asserting an alternative sculptural language grounded in materiality and movement.

In the 1970s, Benglis expanded her practice to include performance-based video works and provocative self-representations that directly confronted gender norms and institutional power structures within the art world. Her now-iconic advertisements and photographic works challenged conventions of authorship, sexuality, and artistic authority, securing her position as a leading voice in feminist art discourse.

Throughout her career, Benglis has resisted stylistic consistency, instead pursuing a practice defined by continual reinvention. Her work engages with art historical traditions ranging from Baroque dynamism to Surrealism, while remaining resolutely contemporary in its challenge to hierarchies of taste and medium. This refusal of categorization has been central to her influence across generations of artists.

Benglis has exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally and has been the subject of numerous major retrospectives. Her work is held in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Tate, affirming her lasting impact on contemporary sculpture and feminist art.