This Friday is the last day to view the exhibition Circa 70 at Cheim & Read Gallery, featuring work by Season 1 artist Louise Bourgeois and fellow artist Lynda Benglis, in New York.
In this show, sculptures by Bourgeois and Benglis, mostly completed between 1967 and 1974, coexist in surprising harmony despite their completion by two very separate artists within a shifting political and artistic landscape. Working within the charged artistic atmosphere of postmodernism, Bourgeois and Benglis created material-savvy sculptures more attune to messy abstraction and process-oriented gesture than to conceptual formalism. Their sculptural manifestations explored autobiographical experience and the female subject.
Though the two artists are 30 years apart in age—Bourgeois was born in 1911 and Benglis in 1941—their sculptures in the early 1970s have unexpected similarities. Both artists created organically-shaped, often grotesque amorphous forms. Both reference the undulating, layered landscape of the body and its private, internal anatomy while connecting to the ripe fecundity of the natural world, and the earth’s own internal brewing and bubbling.
More than 30 years later, their work provides reflection on our own cultural and political situation. Revisited, it still shocks and is charged with the energy of the artists’ physical manipulation of material and their intuitive, emotional and rebellious response to a burgeoning decade.
View images and read more about the exhibition here.
