Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Lynda Benglis
American (b.1941)
MORISSE (1985)
copper, nickel, chrome, gold
48" x 43" x 14"
STYLE: sculpture

The grace and elegance of this work results from the way familiar sculptural materials—chrome, nickel, and copper—are transformed into beautifully draped and knotted folds, like a piece of cloth tied in a bow.

To art historians, Morrisse suggests the ancient Greco-Roman sculptors' expertise in making stone behave like drapery, particularly in statues like the Nike of Samothrace. To feminists, Benglis is making a comment on sexuality and womanhood—the drooping flower or the discarded ballgown suggested by the sculpture could be an ironic reference to rejected values of dainty femininity.

To critics, Benglis seems to be walking a fine line between the priorities of painting and the priorities of sculpture, creating a work which has sculptural relief elements but employs imagery and color like a painting. Complexity of interpretation is suited to the layers of illusion employed by Morrisse. Metal looks like cloth, substance seems ephemeral, and sculpture takes on the narrative concerns of painting.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Holland Cotter, Art in America, 7/87
"...they suggested both immense, knotted ribbons or hyperbolic tropical flowers...The sexual content...remained unmistakable...to create a fiction of weightlessness in copper, aluminum, and bronze...they also underscored a general sense of a "classical moment" in decline...piece after piece brought to mind the pleated, wet-drapery lines of the Samothrace—rhythmically complex, exultant, and, of course, a ruin...the suggestion of Victory slipping into decadence, the flower just fading, the body beginning the process of it fall certainly defines a stance at once epicurean and elegiac—"

Susan Krane, Albright Knox, Structure to Resemblance, 6/87
"...Benglis' sculptural pieces seem to oppose the forces of gravity and to possess an internal kinesthetics. This undercurrent of anthropomorphism often had a surreal tinge that was heightened by the overt—and unexpected—sensuality of much of her art...Most of her sculpture falls within the range of relief and thus also maintains the frontality and strong iconic presence fundamental to painting...Benglis' most recent objects retain the visceral qualities and multiplicity of references developed in her earlier work...The exteriors of the artist's recent sculptures are newly complex. Their pleated surfaces are reminiscent of Classical columns and also of the luxurious, deeply carved folds in baroque sculpture. These forms are metallized...Her recent forms are flamboyantly pinched, twisted, bowed, constricted and expanded. They have assumed a greater expressive range that allows more layers, duplicitous references to artistic traditions and natural forms...As Benglis has compounded the metaphorical aspects of her sculpture, it has become more enigmatic. While her works are increasingly accessible—through their exquisite and seductive—their meaning is ironically, ever more withheld and complex."

Alice R. Gray, ARTnews, 5/91
"...an extraordinary artist who for three decades has enlivened many of the artistic styles that have sprung up in modernism's wake...she has wrestled with the influences of Minimalism, Pop Art and feminism in her quest for expression. A follower of the gestural expressionist tradition she has pledged allegiance to form rather than to content, and yet her allusions and metaphors indicate a truly complex engagement with both politics and the human body...From her elongated beeswax 'paintings' to her later metallic works, Benglis' sculptures mimic the size, shape, and feel of a woman's body as it is molded, kneaded, pleated, and painted from the outside in....Benglis is a skilled strategist, and in between the polished folds of these works may lie a further exploration of exactly how our inner selves are hidden behind layers of adornment."