Lynda Benglis 10 Feb - 17 Mar 2012 11 Duke Street, St James's 3 Duke Street, St James's

The Directors of Thomas Dane Gallery are pleased to present a solo exhibition of cult American artist, Lynda Benglis (b. 1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana). This major survey will be the artist's first in the UK.

Benglis broke through the 1960's New York art scene with works of poured latex and foam in brash colours, and quickly established her position as a renegade challenging the conventions and dogmatic primacy of Minimalism and Pop.

For the last forty years, Benglis has continued to pursue her own idiosyncratic path, borrowing liberally from Abstract Expressionism, Colour Field Painting, Pop Art and Minimalism and inventing a new process within painting and sculpture. Using a broad range of materials - wax, polyurethane, rubber, zinc, clay, bronze, gold leaf, glitter etc -  she renders objects as solid, tangible gesture and creates forms literally as extensions of the body. Her parallel and equally radical body of work in video and photography explores gender relations, power structures and artistic identity.

Her defiant nature was exemplified by a mythical advertisement in the November 1974's edition of ArtForum, in which she posed naked brandishing a dildo - satirising the machismo of the art world.

Lynda Benglis continues to be hugely influential to a younger generation interested in such various ideas as feminism, performance, process driven art and grappling with the sacrosanct area of painting. A long-overdue retrospective of Benglis' works was recently organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin and has travelled to a number of partner museums in Europe and the US, including the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven and the New Museum, NY. It has recently opened at MoCA, its final destination. Lynda Benglis shares her time between New York, Ahmedabad, India and Kastellorizo, Greece.

The exhibition will be held in both Thomas Dane galleries, with large pours and sculptural works from the 60's onward in the new space (No. 3 Duke Street). Smaller plinth and wall based works will be shown in the original galleries at No. 11.