The presence of water in a city as dry and plateau as Madrid in the midst of the climate crisis does not fail to contain enormous intrinsic poetry: that is why the work of Lynda Benglis resonates. in a special way at Jardín de Banca March. Leaks, spills, spurts, spurts: all these things are an essential part of the vocabulary of this American sculptor, a key figure in understanding the drift of contemporary art at the beginning of the 21st century.
His works often seem like accidents, too spontaneous to be intentional, and yet they are. He has achieved that magic thanks to an exhaustive study of the materials he works with and his experimentation with different foundries.
This 84-year-old artist arrived in New York in 1964, at the age of 22, after having studied painting in New Orleans. Her mother, a housewife with an artistic vocation, who took painting courses by correspondence at the Art Institute of Chicago, and her father, owner of a construction materials company, were very important influences on her. Her mother because of her vocation and her father because her product samples would become a strange source of inspiration. The rivers, the oceans, the mysterious beds of the large aquatic surfaces with their mud, all of this is part of the universe of a woman who grew up surrounded by water in Louisiana. Benglis made her first trip to the sea at age 11, when her grandmother took her to her family home where she and her ancestors had grown up in Greece.
The artist has recalled this experience on several occasions as absolutely seminal: the memories of her feet covered in mud on her way through the pine forests to the beach, the reflection of the waters when sailing through them in a humble motorboat, the fascination with the algae and its phosphorescent light. One of her best known works, Contraband, It is called that precisely in homage to the cabin where his mother’s family kept fishing equipment in Greece. The first time the artist was going to show it to the public, at the end of the sixties, she ended up removing it because the Whitney Museum, the institution where it is currently located, would not let her show it how she wanted: that strange latex rubber surface that It formed a kind of lava tongue of lime green, yellow, red and blue, spread over the ground, so that it was both painting and sculpture, natural and industrial, aggressive and sensual.
It would be just one of the first forays into a language that explores the tension between the liquid and solid states, and that reaches its maximum apogee in the fountains, characteristic elements of his production. “I always wanted to make fountains. Having grown up on a lake, near water, was what led me to want to work with it and with its movement,” she told Andrew Bonacina in the monograph he wrote about her in 2002. “The water flows over them and to the around her. They are like eruptions that erupt from the earth, and the water articulates that explosive character. This is something you feel in the body, the suction of gravity. “I’ve always been very aware of that, and it comes out in my work, probably all of my work, in one way or another.”
The wave of the world, Created for the 1984 Louisiana World’s Fair, it is one of the four pieces that will be in Madrid until June 29. Pink Lady (for Asha) (2013) is the only source of the exhibition made in polyurethane. It has a surprising fluorescent pink color and its rough surface is reminiscent of the piles of sand and mud expelled by crabs and crustaceans on the seashore. After Bounty, Amber Waves and Fruited Plane, three identical sources that constitute a single work, refer to the patriotic idea of natural abundance in the United States. The last two are taken from the lyrics of the anthem America the Beautiful. The smallest of the four fountains, Knight Mer, takes the shape of a crustacean. All the pieces, with their constant flow, play with the idea of the classic fountain as if it were a contemporary monument to nature and an allegory of an earth in crisis where water is the resource in danger.
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