Senga Nengudi’s Works Stretch, Contract, and Breathe New Purpose into Found Materials

Among an array of archival documents and photos in a vitrine at the entrance to the Lenbachhaus’s Senga Nengudi exhibition lay an early artist’s statement that began: “I am working with nylon mesh because it relates to the elasticity of the human body. From tender, tight beginnings to sagging end.” The statement is dated 1977, when a thirty-four-year-old Nengudi was beginning to exhibit what would, many years later, become her most iconic body of work: the “RSVP&rdq