Kunstmuseum Basel | Neubau will present Lynda Benglis from 13 March to 1 August 2027, in the first comprehensive Swiss retrospective of the American artist (b. 1941). Curated by Elena Filipovic with Len Schaller, the exhibition brings together more than 60 works spanning the late 1960s to the present.

The exhibition traces Benglis’s experimentation across painting, sculpture, photography and video, with materials including latex, polyurethane foam, wax, ceramic, glitter and metal. Among the highlights is Phantom (1971), her only surviving glow-in-the-dark polyurethane installation, which will be shown publicly in Europe for the first time.

Since the 1960s, Lynda Benglis has been known for her playful yet visceral, organic yet abstract approach to form. Emerging alongside Postminimalism, she challenged the conventions of painting and sculpture, developing a series of influential works in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Her early wax paintings combined pigmented beeswax and dammar resin, initially applied in thin, skin-like layers. Benglis later used a blowtorch as a brush, manipulating the wax into marbled surfaces that pushed beyond the confines of her lozenge-shaped Masonite supports. This desire to free form from the limits of the traditional picture plane led to her experiments with pigmented latex, which she began pouring directly onto the floor. Using gravity and her own body as part of the process, Benglis drew comparisons with Jackson Pollock’s technique, a connection reinforced by her appearance at work in the 27 February 1970 issue of Life magazine.