For Frieze Masters London 2021, Ortuzar Projects is pleased to announce a three-person presentation of works by Lynda Benglis, Andé Cadere, and Anita Steckel. Active in New York in the 1970s, each artist resisted prevailing notions of painting to create uniquely hybrid works in expanded form, across performance, new media, and sculpture. Courting controversy for her explicit critique of sexism in the history of figuration, Anita Steckel eventually incorporated photocopy, silkscreen, and montage into her graphite and oil compositions, melding fantasy and reality in works such as her monumental New York Skyline series (1970–80). A rare example of Cadere’s best known work, Round bar of wood B 01234000, is scaled to the artist’s own height, a portable double that is neither painting nor sculpture. The bar’s discrete quadrants of color rhyme with the structured, psychedelic abstractions he painted in Paris in the late-1960s. Benglis’s pleated wall-based sculptures were developed through a highly technical process of hand-folding wire mesh—afterwards sprayed with molten metal and selectively polished or delicately leafed in gold—manipulating the support itself into a baroque gesture suspended in space.

Anita Steckel (b. 1930, Brooklyn, New York; d. 2012, New York) studied at Cooper Union and Alfred University, as well as the Art Students League of New York, where she was an instructor from 1984 until her death. Since 1970 she lived at Westbeth Artists’ Housing in the West Village. She is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles and a forthcoming exhibition at the Stanford Art Gallery, Stanford (2022). Recent solo exhibitions include Legal Gender: The Irreverent Art of Anita Steckel, Jacki Headley Art Gallery, California State University, Chico and Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento (2018); Anita of New York, The Suzanne Geiss Company, New York (2013); Anita Steckel and Friends, Westbeth Gallery, New York (2012); and Mom Art: 1963 –1965, Mitchell Algus Gallery, New York. Steckel’s work was included in the survey exhibitions Maskulinitäten, Bonner Kunstverein, Germany (2019); Cock, Paper, Scissors, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles (2016); Black Sheep Feminism: The Art of Sexual Politics, Dallas Contemporary (2016); and Identity Crisis: Authenticity, Attribution and Appropriation, The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY (2011). She was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1983) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2005). Her work is the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia; Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Kansas; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; and Sammlung Verbund Collection, Vienna.

André Cadere (b. 1934, Warsaw, Poland; d. 1978, Paris) lived and worked in Romania, Paris, and New York. Recent major solo exhibitions include André Cadere: Pas à pas, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2018); Textual Pieces, Photographs, Ephemera, Galerie Herve Bize, Nancy, France (2018); André Cadere: Conceptual Documents 1972–1978, Art Encounters, Timisoara, Romania (2015); Documenting Cadere 1972–1978, Modern Art Oxford, Mu.ZEE, Ostende, Belgium, Artists Space, New York (2013); Cadere/la barre de bois rond et ses avatars, Espace d’art Le Moulin, La Valette du Var, France (2013); and André Cadere: Peinture sans fin, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany. Cadere’s work is in the permanent collections of public institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Tate Modern, London; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp; MAMCO, Genève; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others.

Lynda Benglis (b.1941, Lake Charles, Louisiana) lives and works in New York and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her work is currently the subject of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2021–22) and a forthcoming exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas (2022). Recent major solo exhibitions include Lynda Benglis: Early Work, 1967–1979 at Ortuzar Projects and Cheim & Read, New York (2020); Lynda Benglis: In the Realm of the Senses, Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, presented by NEON (2019–20); Face Off, Kistefos-Museet, Jevnaker (2018); Lynda Benglis, The Hepworth Wakefield, Yorkshire (2015); and Lynda Benglis, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Le Consortium, Dijon, RISD Museum, Providence, the New Museum, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2009–11). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of public institu- tions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Tate, London.