A pioneer of temporal, vernacular materials, audacious colors, and unapologetic sensory pleasure, Lynda Benglis (b. 1941, USA) has brushed wax, poured latex and phosphorescent foam, layered video, air sprayed metals, stretched paper, and cut-up ceramic. Her unexpected tactile pursuits continuously sidestep mainstream movements in contemporary art.

Diving straight into the humorous rebuke of her minimalist contemporaries and their heyday exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1966, Lynda Benglis’s opening installation in Bergen, Primary Structures (Paula’s Props), 1975, inaugurates the yearlong inquiry into her practice by PRAXES. An odd collection of campy ready-made objects—velvet cloth, broken columns, a toy car, a ficus tree—this work is a stand-alone gesture in an artistic oeuvre that has continuously valued drastic departures, foreign materials, and collaborative experiments.

Throughout 2016, Benglis’s unruly cross-approaches will inspire a series of meticulous reinstallations, displays of recent work, devil-may-care detours, and attempts at tracing material histories. Starting from Primary Structures and closing with Is It Now?—a series of intimate screenings of Benglis’s entire video production from 1972 to 1976—this unspooling of her practice in Bergen is more artworks-in-residence than retrospective, more catalyst than compendium.