Lynda Benglis (b. 1941)
Devil’s Bath
Purified pigmented beeswax and dammar resin crystals and pigment on composite board.
1993
Signed, titled and dated “L Benglis ’93 “Devil’s Bath”” on the reverse.
38 3/8 x 5 x 1 1/8 in. (97.5 x 12.7 x 2.9 cm.)
Executed in 1993 in New Zealand, when the artist was participating in the Auckland
Artist-in-Residence programme, and inspired by the Waiotapu geothermal area.
Provenance:
– Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles.
– Private collection, acquired from the above in 2007.
Exhibition:
– Auckland City Art Gallery, Lynda Benglis: From the Furnace, October 15–November 25, 1993, no. 2, pp. 28, 40 (illustrated, p. 28).
– Los Angeles, Margo Leavin Gallery, Installations, July 16–August 20, 1994.
Literature:
– Lynda Benglis: From the Furnace, exhibition catalogue from the Auckland City Art Gallery, 1993, illustrated in color p. 28 (cat. 2).
Executed in 1993 in New Zealand, this work is inspired by the Waiotapu geothermal area and its steaming hot springs of otherwordly colors, most of them diabolically named (Devil’s Bath, Devil’s Inkpots, Thunder Crater, Devil’s Home, etc.). This place revived the artist’s enthusiasm for the medium of wax painting she had already used in the 1960’s and 1970’s and for the accretion process also involved in the landscapes of Waiotapu.
Benglis’ art celebrates elemental forces, natural processes (snowdrifts and waves, frozen waterfalls, rock formations, stalagmites) and seek to embody the “frozen gesture”, as stated by the artist. Her direct engagement with the matter and her depiction of organic forms stand in opposition to the major Minimalists of the 1960’s who removed the physical act of creation from their work and, in her words, lacked a “sense of theater”.
Benglis has also been “answering the fusion of painting and sculpture that had taken place in the mid-’60s” (as Pincus-Witten put it in his 1974 Artforum essay), notably with her “pours” of Day-Glo pigmented latex or polyurethane foam onto the floor and her wax paintings.
Her artistic gesture is here visible through the multiple layers of pigmented beeswax, spread with a paintbrush the same width of the vertical panel, going from the center to the rounded edges. The repetitive opposite strokes and the dual nature of the wax (soft and hard) evoke the sensuality and the balance between the Yin and Yang energies.