Beyond the graphic design friendliness of their common initials and the fact that they exhibit with the same gallery, Louise Bourgeois and Lynda Benglis are curatorially a natural pair. They are both inveterate explorers of sculpture’s soggy underbelly, doyennes of dark sexuality and the nebulous space between the personal and the universal.

But the coupling is not without edge: These are women of markedly different generations whose attitudes toward the body and the sculptural object come to bear in relation to their work. Ms. Bourgeois, the elder artist by 30 years, is steeped in Surrealism and the ethnographic interests of her husband, the art historian Robert Goldwater, while Ms. Benglis is of the generation of conceptual artists that emerged in the wake of minimal art and Pop Art. This is a show where you often have to check the wall label because of the degree of overlap in material quality and form vocabulary of these two artists. It is a coupling, in other words, underwritten by formalism, despite the fact that the art is often anti-formalist in intention and effect.

Well-known photographs of the artists hung together in the first room, a chapellike antechamber to the gallery proper, are an essay in compare and contrast. Duane Michael’s “Portrait of Louise Bourgeois in her Chelsea home” (1980) show a demur, matronly, housewife in a traditional setting, while Ms. Benglis is seen in her notorious double-page spread from the November 1974 issue of Artforum in which she poses provocatively, hand-on-hip, naked, greased up Hustler-magazine style, with a dildo between her legs.

Just next to the Benglis ad is a shelf of five bronze elements by Ms. Bourgeois, “Untitled” (1970–72). They may be vaguely phallic, but you would not want them put to use like Ms. Benglis’s sex toy — which Ms. Benglis cast in bronze, as “Smile” (1974) — as the forms are rusty-looking and menacingly jagged. More to the unphallic point, the fact that they are in a series spreads out their variable meanings: They become a family of forms, possibly digits. Where the younger artist is playing with a mass-produced form, the elder is evoking a sense of the primitive and pre-industrial. One is an object that meets a market need, the other some timeless ritual.

Another pairing of works in this first room signals the chief formal and psychological shared concern of the two artists: spillage. They are both devoted to gunge and splatter, to a sense of matter oozing out, visceral and decentered. Ms. Benglis’s “Quartered Meteor” (1969) in lead has a pile of gooey forms caught in arrested flow. Installed in the corner of the room, the implied sense is that the room has been built around it, that the flow would otherwise continue in another three directions. “Janus Fleuri” (1968) by Ms. Bourgeois also has a sense of something cracked open and revealing its innards. A bronze object suspended on a wire, it is essentially abstract though figural, with connotations of a skull or a torso — or, for that matter, a croissant. But the works signal contrasting generational ideas about sculpture: Ms. Bourgeois’s piece is an object, Ms. Benglis’s a process. One has shaped material, the other has released it.

Bronze, in both artists’ handling, makes a monument out of fluid dissolute forms. Its alternating rough and smooth captures the contrast as well as the confusion between internal and external. This comes across in several pairings of the women’s sculptures, such as Ms. Benglis’s “Come” (1974) and Ms. Bourgeois’s “End of Softness” (1967). Both sculptures have a sticky wet look that speaks to the sexual politics of their moment. Their fondness for the loose and open almost seems to say that centeredness and definition are masculine sculptural attributes. But where “Come” is a molten lump dripping out, “End of Softness” is a swirling, churning mass, hardening and coming together.

The primitive and archaic are never far from the surface in Ms. Bourgeois’s sculpture. But this aspiration to the timeless is, ironically, very of her time: She is deeply steeped in the aesthetics of abstract Surrealism. Her softness may have feminist implications, but it relates equally to the biomorphism of Arp and the camembert cheese watches of Dalí — no feminist he! Her “soft landscapes” like “Avenza” (1968–69), an agglomeration of breast-like orbs cast in perpetually sticky-looking latex, are as deeply traditional as they are Surrealist. She has said, in relation to these works, that “our own body could be considered, from a topographical point-ofview, a land with mounds and valleys and caves and holes.” Feminist as it may be, this statement is also redolent of the neo-romanticism of Henry Moore.

Ms. Benglis also plays with the womanliness of landscape idioms in her pancake puddles and sausage figures, but in contrast to Ms. Bourgeois’s brooding metaphysics, she is always blessed by brashness. Her materials are tacky in the stylistic as well as the literal sense: The stickiness, at once compelling and disagreeable, she shares with Ms. Bourgeois, but her variously Pop and post-minimal sensibility is pure 1960s: The droopy, flimsy awkwardness of her tubular knot pieces, such as “Oscar” (1974), put you in mind of Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures or the felt or leather arrangements of Robert Morris or Richard Serra.

These male counterparts notwithstanding, Ms. Benglis and Ms. Bourgeois stand out as pioneers of a feminist aesthetic. Whether ominous and sacral, like Ms. Bourgeois, or sexy and fun, like Ms. Benglis, they are inspiring as artists intent upon personal and collective liberation. As Robert Pincus-Witten, a critic with long associations with both artists, writes in his sparky, polemical catalogue essay on B&B, as he calls them, they “re-affirm art’s power as a weapon in the resistance of today’s resurgent political and religious fundamentalism.”

Until August 31 (547 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-242-7727).