When Lynda Benglis moved to New York from her native Louisiana in 1964, she was an abstract painter searching for ways to redefine the medium. Barnett Newman became a friend and mentor, his energetic Zips directly influencing her early work. Benglis’s Totem sculptures and encaustic wax paintings from this time incorporate unusually tall and narrow vertical supports, similar to those Newman used for The Wild. Benglis soon brought a new materiality and temporality to sculpture, achieving international renown with her poured latex, and later poured foam, works. Figure 6 has an imposing scale and presence; like many of Benglis’s pieces, however, it is made of common hardware- store items. To create Figure 6, the artist sprayed foam to “draw” on a chicken-wire armature before casting the sculpture in aluminum. Its tangled texture and undulating form recall, according to the artist, the crenellations of brain coral or the towering mounds of mud pellets left by burrowing crawfish.