Senga Nengudi
American • b. 1943
Biography
Emerging as an artist in the avant-garde scenes of Los Angeles and New York in the 1960s and 1970s, Senga Nengudi has been a trailblazing and influential force for over 50 years. Nengudi’s pioneering practice is currently the focus at the Henry Moore Foundation in Leeds, which represents the artist’s first solo institutional exhibition outside of the United States.
Characterized by a persistently radical experimentation with material and form, Nengudi’s work spans sculpture, performance, and photography. Building upon the legacy of abstraction, Nengudi imbues her work with human, philosophical and spirituals concerns. In her famous R.S.V.P. series, for example, she stretched, filled and knotted nylon tights with sand and mounted them on walls to create “abstracted reflections of used bodies”. Initiated in 1975 following her pregnancy, the series represent humble, yet powerful, icons of the triumphs and traumas of the human body.
Insights
Selected honors: Women's Caucus For Art – Lifetime Achievement Award (2010); Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2005); Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2005)
"To shape shift paradigms I find different ways to use materials others consider useless or insignificant providing proof that the disregarded and disenfranchised may also have the resilience and reformative ability to find their poetic selves.”
Past Lots
191
Senga Nengudi
R.S.V.P. Reverie—Stale Mate
Estimate $15,000 - 20,000
Sold for $30,480
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12
Senga Nengudi
Rapunzel
Estimate On Request
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