Lynda Benglis | Pink Lady (for Asha) | 2013

Lynda Benglis began her career in the late 1960s, experimenting with a wide range of materials—pigmented latex, beeswax, polyurethane foam—to evoke different surfaces and textures to create new forms. She became a central figure in the 1970s Feminist movement, where exploration of themes such as body, identity and place helped bring the processes and materials of “women’s work” into the fine art world, breaking down the hierarchy between “high” and “low” culture. Benglis resisted the “masculine” gestures and materials of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, using events from her own life and formal interests in a career marked by constant radical experimentation.

Benglis’s sensual pink fountain honors Asha Sarabhai, sister-in-law of Benglis’ deceased partner Anand Sarabhai. It was Anand Sarabhai who first invited the artist to work at the Sarabhai’s family home in India in 1979, where Benglis has continued to work ever since. Benglis, who grew up in southern Louisiana in a Greek family, has long explored the importance of water to human life and our creative imagination, and of the landscape that sustains us. Her fountain fills a small urban oasis with the life-affirming calm of water, its translucent form in a languid stretch toward the sun.