Lee Bontecou, the artist most generally recognized for her wall-mounted works evocative of science fiction and fabricated from industrial supplies together with metal, rope, canvas, cloth and extra, has died. Bontecou was 91 years outdated, and handed away in her residence in Florida.
Bontecou rose to prominence within the male-dominated New York artwork world of the Nineteen Sixties, and her penchant for industrial supplies and menacing aesthetics was a far cry from what might need been thought of the realm of ladies’s artwork on the time. (Some critics, nonetheless, nonetheless insisted that the open varieties in her work have been allusions to feminine anatomy, a declare Bontecou firmly dismissed, asserting that these maws had extra to do with the infinite blackness of house than with earthly genitalia.) She was among the many first ladies artists to be represented by the tastemaking gallerist Leo Castelli—placing her alongside Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Claus Oldenburg and others—and there was a interval by which Bontecou was the one girl on the roster. Within the Seventies, she abruptly fled the New York artwork scene, shifting to a farm in rural Pennsylvania, the place she continued to make work however ceased exhibiting for a few years.
Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1960, personal assortment Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, New York
Born in Windfall, Rhode Island in 1931, Bontecou’s father was a salesman and her mom labored wiring submarine components in the course of the Second World Warfare. Her mom’s involvement within the conflict effort put the potential for contemporary life’s chic horror firmly into Bontecou’s consciousness, and summers spent in her mom’s native Nova Scotia allowed her to develop a deep love of nature—notably marine life. It’s straightforward to invest how these appreciations of the commercial chic and the natural, pure world might have melded to form Bontecou’s aesthetic, which is as fluid as it’s ominous.
In 1953, Bontecou moved to New York to enroll within the Artwork College students League, the place she studied beneath George Grosz, Robert Brackman, William Zorach and others. In 1954, she spent a summer season on the Skowhegan College of Sculpture and Portray in Maine, the place she discovered to weld, a ability that will grow to be important in her observe. From 1956 to 1957, she studied in Rome on a Fulbright scholarship, throughout which era she concocted one other methodology that will show important to her observe: she found that by turning the oxygen off on her welding torch, the machine would produce a deep black soot with which she might make photographs. She developed strategies to “harness the black”, as she put it, that included making use of the soot to paperboard earlier than utilizing a razor blade to scrape off sure areas, creating intricate flat works she known as “worldscapes”.
In a 1971 solo present at Leo Castelli Gallery, Bontecou debuted a physique of labor that stepped away from the commercial wall reliefs and as an alternative targeted on natural varieties constituted of translucent plastic and impressed by flora and sea life. The present—which might be her final New York solo present for practically 30 years—was met with blended opinions, and shortly after Bontecou and her husband, artist Will Giles, relocated to rural Pennsylvania, the place she continued to make artwork however opted to not exhibit it. “No one appeared to know the place she had gone,” wrote writer Calvin Tomkins in a 2003 article for The New Yorker, by which he referred to “the disappearance of Lee Bontecou” as “an art-world thriller”. And although she commuted all through these a long time to show artwork at Brooklyn School, she maintained her distance from the artwork world, even turning down a proposal to exhibit within the 1995 Whitney Biennial.
Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1968 Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York, New York
In 2003, Bontecou agreed to a serious exhibition of her work. It was collectively organised by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Artwork in Chicago, and later traveled to the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York. The retrospective included work from her time in New York in addition to her a long time away from the town. In a 2003 dialog with Hammer Museum director Ann Philbin, Bontecou took difficulty with assertions that she had left the artwork world, arguing that an artist whose life centres on their observe is as a lot in “the artwork world”—if no more so—than one involved with exhibits and the market. “I’ve by no means left the artwork world,” she stated. “I’m in the actual artwork world.”
Since her return to exhibiting, Bontecou has been part of solo and group exhibits all through the world, and immediately her work is within the everlasting assortment of establishments together with MoMA, the Whitney, the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, the Hirshhorn, the Nationwide Gallery in Washington, DC, the MCA Chicago and the Artwork Institute of Chicago, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, and lots of extra.
