(working title)

Producer – Dermot Smyth

In Development

This film is an impressionistic portraiture of iconoclastic painter and sculptor Lynda Benglis, following her from New York to Dublin, for her major exhibition at the historic Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham. It is also the first time Lynda will show a key sculptural installation representing a key theme of her work, an elaborate fountain North South East West (NSEW) in the formal grounds of the Museum. From the foundry where it was cast in New York, from the Brooklyn shipyard to the bay of Dublin, to final installation and gallery opening, this film not only captures the scale of this event, but also reveals the processual character of Benglis’s work and practice.

Lynda Benglis rose to fame in the late 1960s, challenging the American male-centricism of Abstract Expressionism, and with it the reigning conventions of the art world. Translating Jackson Pollack’s drip technique into sculptural forms, Benglis’s expansive pours of vibrant pigmented latex paint started her extraordinary career of combining painting and sculpture. Benglis cemented her reputation as a renegade in her famous and controversial mockery of sexual stereotypes in Artforum Magazine in November 1974, where she stood naked, defiantly, clutching a dildo protruding from her crotch.

From her poured latex and massive polyurethane sculptures, her luminous wax reliefs, her ground-breaking video work, to her metalized pleats, knots, bows and torso’s, Benglis led the way for many young artists’ engagement with the incongruous, the profane and the erotic.

Benglis has constantly challenged how the work of art has become institutionalized, her work mocking and defying the limits of the gallery experience, and frustrating all efforts to be labeled within a simplistically defined center.

Benglis’s work and practice is perfectly suited to film’s ability to create new parameters for a different kind of seeing, moving us both viscerally and intellectually. Breaking new ground in her explorations of the video medium in the 70s, it is now appropriate that this elusive artist is celebrated in a reflexive mode of documentary film.