Carl Andre and Lynda Benglis

About

The presentations celebrate both artists’ long history with the gallery, as they first exhibited with Paula Cooper in 1978 and 1979 respectively, and demonstrate their contemporaneous yet markedly divergent approach to process and material. The exhibitions will be on view through June 16th, 2018.

On view is Andre’s floor sculpture, Copper Blue Lattice, New York, 1990, comprised of sixty-five copper and limestone tiles as its constituent building blocks. Laid in a grid arrangement on the floor, Andre underscores the specificities of matter—which Andre considered his “palette”—and the relationships between element and whole. Also on view by Andre is his work of poetry entitled One Hundred Sonnets, composed of 100 typewritten pages each bearing a single word repeated multiple times in a square pattern.

Creating work that is often irreverent and sardonic with strong sociopolitical underpinnings, Lynda Benglis is well known for her gestural and process driven works that provided a timely retort to her contemporary Minimalist—and predominately male—peers. “I always wanted to approach organic form in a very direct way, in the way that he [Andre] approached geometric form. It has to do with knowing about materials. I found, in approaching organic form, that it was quite necessary to know about the change of matter and the timing and the flow of the material. I felt I wanted to define for myself the organic phenomena; what nature itself would suggest to me in sculpture. I wanted it to be very primal, suggestive but not too specific; very iconographic but also very open”1 On view by Benglis is one of her iconic early floor pieces, composed of brightly pigmented poured latex, as well as new works and a selection of earlier wall pieces. These explorations of metaphorical and biomorphic shapes demonstrate the artist’s interest in the physicality of form and its affect on the viewer, using a wide range of materials to render dynamic impressions of mass and surface: soft becomes hard, hard becomes soft and gestures are frozen.