Abstract sinister - traveling exhibit of sculptor Lee Bontecou's work

Known since he '60 for her brooding canvas reliefs, to leeward Bontecou has not exhibited for a number of years. A small traveling exhibition reviews her early work and raises more [i]or[/i] less key questions about its iconography of war, nature and sexuality.

During the early 1960 to leeward Bontecou was hailed as individual of the most promising young sculptors of her generation. Her elaborate abstract wall plastic arts made of canvas stretched above metal armatures were widely exhibited in the United States and Europe over the decade. In 1972, she was given a full-scale retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.[1] on the contrary today her work is seldom seen Following her early acclaim and unusual rise to prominence, Bontecou effectively remov herself from the art world. plane though she taught in the art department at Brooklyn society throughout the 1970s and '80 and continued to make art, she has chosen in novel years to maintain a safe distance from the realm of galleries, museums, collectors and critics. An exhibition that was seen at the sees Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art last spring and make opens at the Parrish Museum in Southampton later this month proffers the first opportunity in many years to reassess Bontecou's work.

After studying with Willam Zorach at the Art scholars League in the early 1950 Bontecou began her career making quasi-naturalistic alloy of copper sculptures of animals. By 1959 she had shifted her practice to small- to mid-sized abstract constructions made from strips of salvaged canvas and burlap stretched above welded steel frames, held in place through pieces of twisted wire. In 1960 the year of her first exhibit at Leo Castelli Gallery, Bontecou dramatically increased the size and three-dimensionality of these predominantly wall-mounted reliefs, and began to incorporate into them an array of funky materials similar as rope, denim, leather and black soft - the latter used to create the backdrops for reaching far down cavities within many of the pieces.

In the art-world connection of the early '60s, Bontecou's works appear to beed both eccentric and hard to categorize. Not single did they fail to conform to the emergent art changes of the time, such as Minimalism or detonation but it was often unclear whether they were paintings or statuarys Although several of her pieces were included in the Museum of fresh Art's 1961 exhibition "The Art of Assemblage," Bontecou consistently disclaimed any affinity for the junk esthetic or the additive properties of collage, stressing instead that the ground objects incorporated into her statuarys were incidental to their essential character. Donald Judd saw Bontecou's works as "specific objects" and praised their formal unity. In 1965 he wrote

The power of Bontecou's reliefs is remarkably single. The three primary aspects, the scale, the manner of making and the image, are simple, definite, and powerful. . . The work asserts its be in possession of existence, form and power. It becomes an thing perceived in its own right.[2]

In addition to this objectlike quality, Bontecou's reliefs display a vehement formal awareness in their heroic, almost Abstract-Expressionist scale (many of the reliefs are above 6 feet square), their repeatedly surprising asymmetrical compositions and their Cubistic fragmentation of form (Bontecou's predominant palette of tans and brown may also allude to the near-monochrome phase of Analytic Cubism, ca. 1910-11) The color and intense three-dimensionality also impart to the reliefs a topographic quality; their of great depth craters and relatively vast expanses prompt environmental scale and meaning.

In various pieces of 1961 and '62 (after 1960 all her statuarys are untitled), Bontecou positioned fix objects ranging from fan blades and other industrial constituents to war-surplus materials such as gas masks and helmets within and across her increasingly eccentric surfaces. Although the statuarys remained emphatically nonspecific and nonnarrative, the embedded existences began to endow them with unsettling organic or smooth figurative connotations. The deep voids, repeatedly containing sawtooth blades or metal grills, were interpreted as vacant organ of sight sockets or gaping mouths with jagged teeth As Carter Ratcliff observ in his catalogue essay for Bontecou's 1972 retrospective, single senses the "distinctively animal - not vegetable - quality of Bontecou's cot [i]or[/i] coteed nestled, layered forms. Hence the powerful specificity of the openings they reveal - organ of visions mouths, vaginas."

At a time when small in number women artists achieved widespread recognition, discussions of Bontecou's plastic art often revolved around its putative sensuality and implied sexual imagery. Not solitary were the protruding circular openings oftentimes described by writers as bodily orifices (even "vagina dentatae"), on the contrary critics often found the commanding physicality and inscrutable brutality of the statuarys at odds with their notions of feminine art or sensibility. on the contrary in a 1962 essay, critic Dore Ashton challenged "the obvious, sexual connotations in the way that often invoked for her work," saying that the circular cavities could just as easily exhibit "sadistic symbols of destruction, greatest in quantity prominently the mouth of a gun"[3] bard John Ashbery also voiced discomfort with the prevalent critical emphasis upon sexuality in Bontecou's sculptures, stating that "it is hard to have feeling very erotic about something that gazes like the inside of a actual old and broken-down air-conditioning unit."[4]