NEW YORK—Tauba Auerbach has invited Lynda Benglis to present three works in the front two rooms at 524 West 26th Street, concurrent with her own show. Well known for her gestural and process driven practice, Benglis’s presentation echoes the visual logic of Auerbach’s work.

Two works from Benglis’s series of metalized knots from the 1980s are mounted on the wall in one of the galleries. In the artist’s 1993 exhibition catalogue, curator Andrew Bogle wrote: “Although the finished reliefs are distinctly sculptural, they are realized in terms of a two-dimensional material transformed by folding, pleating, twisting and knotting. They are volumetric in the sense that parts of the pleated metal appear to billow as though inflated by wind, but this is deceptive. In actuality, surface is a continuous skin, enlivened (as if chiseled in deep relief) by sharp corrugations. Benglis’s pleated knots abound with contradictions. They are hard and inflexible, but … seem to float as though borne on an updraft of air.”

Also on view is a sculpture from 2018 titled Elephant: First Foot Forward. With keen sensitivity to organic form, the coiled White Tombasil bronze appears primal, treading the line between iconographic suggestion and open non-specificity. Demonstrating the artist’s interest in the physicality of form and its effect on the viewer, Benglis uses material to render a dynamic impression of mass and surface: soft becomes hard and gesture becomes static.

Lynda Benglis was born in 1941 in Lake Charles, Louisiana and received her B.F.A. in 1964 from Newcomb College in New Orleans. Her work has been exhibited extensively both within the U.S. and abroad, including an internationally traveled retrospective in 2010. Benglis is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among other commendations. Her work is represented in many public collections. Benglis resides in New York, Santa Fe, Walla Walla, WA, Kastellorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com