A great slobby lump of congealed black polyurethane foam slumps in a corner, its poured material arrested in mid-flow. There’s something irreducible about Lynda Benglis’s 1970 Untitled (Köln); it has an air of finality, art reduced to gravity and chemistry and formlessness.
The sculpture comes towards the end of Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction 1950-70, which fills the galleries at Turner Contemporary. Before we get to Benglis, we’ve done a tour of postwar art, from the hurried lines and dots, smudges and scribbles of Indian artist Arpita Singh, like a furious glossolalia, and the rigorous, cool, systemic art of Gillian Wise and of Mary Martin, with their uninflected planes, their mirrors and rectangles of Perspex, their logic and their severe, mathematically derived constructions.
