Installation view

Courtesy Cheim & Read

Louise Bourgeois (born 1911) and Lynda Benglis (born 1941) are rarely paired. A generation apart, Bourgeois’s work is rife with vulvas and castrated phalluses rooted in Surrealism and Freudian traumas. Benglis is a pioneer of Postminimalism, known for her confrontational feminism and process-based pieces made from poured polyurethane or plaster-soaked gauze. Yet in juxtaposing works created by each artist around 1970, this exhibition teases out unanticipated affinities.

Next to the massed pods of Bourgeois’s Avenza (1968–69), for example, Benglis’s knot piece Bravo (1972) suggests a pregnant belly, while the poured layers of her Eat Meat (1973), cast in green bronze, evoke an oozing pile of excrement. Conversely, the presence of Benglis’s sculpture makes it clear how much materials matter in Bourgeois’s oeuvre. The rough fissured latex of Avenza resembles scrota, reinforcing the piece’s sexual and fetid qualities. Both artists clearly tap into widely felt feminist anger.

Benglis, however, is more in-your-face. Her most notorious piece is a 1974 Artforum ad in which she posed nude with a massive dildo inserted between her legs; a bronze cast of the implement, Smile, shows that it was double-headed. Bourgeois is an artist of far greater depth, her forms sensually and seductively playing on the fine line between pleasure and guilt, attraction and repulsion. Ultimately, these comparisons are apples-and-oranges. The differences themselves are what reveal the most about the richness of these artists’ work.