Lynda Benglis (born October 25, 1941) is an American sculptor and visual artist known especially for her wax paintings and poured latex sculptures.

[5][9] Here she came in contact with many of the influential artists of the decade, such as Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse, and Barnett Newman.

[12] Benglis's work is noted for an unusual blend of organic imagery and confrontation with newer media incorporating influences such as Barnett Newman and Andy Warhol.

For this work, Benglis smeared Day-Glo paint across the gallery floor invoking "the depravity of the 'fallen' woman" or, from a feminist perspective, a "prone victim of phallic male desire.

[17] The structure of the new medium itself played an important role in addressing questions about female identity in relation to art, pop culture, and dominant feminism movements at the time.

[18] Benglis felt underrepresented in the male-run artistic community and so confronted the "male ethos" in a series of magazine advertisements satirizing pin-up girls, Hollywood actresses, and traditional depictions of nude female models in canonical works of art.

[19] This series culminated with a particularly controversial one in the November 1974 issue of Artforum featuring Benglis posing with a large plastic dildo and wearing only a pair of sunglasses promoting an upcoming exhibition of hers at the Paula Cooper Gallery.

[23] In particular, Benglis appears to be undermining June Wayne's theory of the "demonic myth" in which males, in assuming their gender identity, are responsible to a similar posturing and performativity as women, but instead of upholding "feminine" values of passivity, modesty, and gentility, they embody a guise of compensatory hyper-masculinity and heroic bravado.

[23] By adopting a phallus, Benglis physically and symbolically muddies the distinction made between these two types of gender performativity and ultimately overturns them, resulting in a positive assertion of femininity's sexual and cultural power.

"[25] Morris's advertisement, however, generated little commentary, providing evidence for Benglis's view that male artists were encouraged to promote themselves, whereas women were chastised for doing so.

It included the lozenge-shaped wall pieces of built up multicolored wax layers that Benglis started making in 1966 with which she honored Jackson Pollock's famous drip methods.

Her work from the 1980s and 1990s was also shown, represented by a few of her famous pleats, which involved her spraying liquid metal onto chicken wire skeletons, and two videos from each of the decades.

These pieces were made of clay and hand molded so that the viewers could feel the making of them- the extorting, folding, and throwing of the moist resistant material.

The ceramic pieces have a handmade quality that effect the senses both desire driven and dismal, while the colors suggest the glitz of commercial culture.

Concentrating on Benglis's early work, the curators gave her a main position in the diverse art of the 1970s, a time period that is seen as laying the groundwork for the wide range of expression that continues to grow to this day.

Benglis's willingness and ability to mix up gendered tropes with her heroic scales and sparkly colorful finishes while laughing irreverently at views of every moral stripe set her apart from the common customs of feminism and the sexism of the art world.

"[29] This subsequent survey focused on the exploratory breadth of materials Benglis experimented with over the course of her career: polyurethane foam, glass, enamel, stainless steel, beeswax, and poured latex.

[31] In this new work presented at Cheim & Read Gallery in New York, Benglis turned to handmade paper, which she wrapped around thick wire armatures, often painting the sand-tone surface in bright, metallic colors offset by strokes of deep, coal-based black.

As Nancy Princenthal writes in her essay published in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, these works reflect the environment in which they were made, the 'sere and windblown' landscape of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The exuberant forms, folds and contortions, variety of materials, textures and colors, in addition to the size of sculptures, expressed a new sensibility in neobaroque art: contemporary, daring and dynamic.

The exhibition Lynda Benglis: In the Realm of the Senses unites 36 of the artist’s singular creations, spanning half a century from 1969 onwards.

[36] The Nasher Sculpture Center's 2022 summer exhibition titled Lynda Benglis "highlights three bodies of work in media as diverse as traditional bronze and decorative glitter.

[38] Benglis's performance-based videos confront issues of gender and identity by referencing the societal representation and construction of women and their sexuality as well as the interaction between viewer and artist, self and ambiguity.

Though Benglis's sculptures reference sexuality through subtly eroticized materials and forms, her video work approaches the subject conceptually and more explicitly.

[39] Benglis's interest in human form found in her sculptural work is made present in her videos in through the consistent theme of self-reflexivity.

Video offers a direct representation of a figure, a history of popular culture, and a way to illustrate bodies interacting in space, making it useful for feminist discourse.

Consequently, Benglis's work destabilizes what are traditionally believed to be video's "inherent properties" such as liveness and "real" time, spatial orientation and relations, and separation of creator and creation.

Document features a progression undergone by the artist from directed to director, finishing with her writing copyright information juxtaposed to her own image.

[5] Many other of Benglis's earlier solo films are highly technically manipulated, edited, and re-taped, thus blending present and past video sequences and selves to enhance the feeling of artifice.

The conversion of the looped and layered aural and visual components highlights the boundaries of intelligibility, resulting in the disassociation of sound and image.