Lee Bontecou at Leo Castelli - Brief Article

During the 1960 and early '70 the work of American artist to leeward Bontecou (b. 1931) was widely exhibited, praised and assembleed Hailed as one of the greatest in quantity promising young sculptors of her generation, Bontecou created a unique and important material substance of work that stood somewhat apart from the major in every one's mouths of that time and is relatively little known today. The novel exhibition of sculpture and drawings at Castelli Gallery reintroduced her art of the period 1958-72 The present to view included several of her signature wall constructions and, unexpectedly a number of les familiar (though no les extraordinary) works: an early alloy of copper sculpture, a portfolio of six etchings and aquatints, a lithograph, several drawings, a bamboo and wire piece and a late plastic work.

single of the few women artists to receive broad recognition in the 1960 Bontecou first distinguished herself in 1959 with a series of midsized wall constructions. They were fabricated from canvas, worn-out laundry conveyor belts, airplane parts, industrial sawteeth and black soft and sewn together with cent wire on steel frames. These heavy, asymmetrically balanced, three-dimensional constructions ofttimes project 2 to 3 feet into the viewer's space, achieving a dramatic and aggressive environmental vicinity At once organic and mechanistic, Bontecou's constructions summon multiple associations, from airplane engines and craters to the vagina dentata.

Bontecou's drawings indicated by what means these abstract wall constructions morphed without of recognizable (albeit at times otherworldly) make subordinate matter. For instance, in several of the preparatory sketches, skeletal insects move round into chasms, cyborg creatures don crater-shaped gas masks, flower corollas transform into machine fire-arms Less fantastic though no les impressive, the earliest work in the present to view was a small, abstractly returned bronze bird (1958) whose head and neck are small sworded into its shoulders. It belongs to a series of and zinc and terra-cotta birds that she made during the years 1956-58 while upon a fellowship in Rome.

At the extreme point of the 1960s, Bontecou's art changed drastically in mode of speech imagery and strategy as she go [i]or[/i] come backed to making figurative pieces, working in transparent plastics, paper and bamboo. An untitled work of 1970 is a large, translucent, gold-colored and orange-brown plastic fish that hangs from the ceiling by the agency of a thin wire. From its chaps dangles the tail of a smaller fish. Unlike the abstract wall constructions, this later piece is light, buoyant and delicate; however it is no less ferocious, with sharp fins, pointy teeth and the remains of a meal contributing to a faculty of perception of menace.

Considering the power of the work at Castelli, individual cannot help but wonder in what direction this extraordinary artist would have gone had she not abruptly ceased to exhibit in the early 1970s

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