“I like space that never stops. Black is like that. Holes and boxes mean secrets and shelter.”
L ee Bontecou was a female sculptor known for her wall constructions made of found materials such as steel, wire and canvas. Inspired by personal memories of her parents working during World War II, Lee channeled this into her artistic practice, studying sculpture and welding. Bontecou used industrial materials such as steel and wire to create an incredible juxtaposition of hard and soft, mimicking the vastness of infinity and space – themes and techniques explored by many of her other contemporaries such as Vija Celmins, Ruth Asawa and Lynda Benglis. The present work is imbued with one of Bontecou’s most recognizable and celebrated motifs. The viewer is drawn to the sculpture to better understand its textures and layers and curves; at the same t.mes , the work commands respect and brutal honesty.
The extreme tension of the Cold War period, the fighting in Korea, the spirit of exploration in the space race, and the yearning for freedom and equality in the civil rights movement all deeply affected Bontecou’s work in the early 1960s. Bontecou later described her sculptures of this t.mes as “war equipment with teeth.” Some of the holes in her sculptures, viewed by some as eyes or orifices, were often covered in bars reminiscent of the prisons, camps, and barbed wire of war - a reminder of the tension and brutality of war. Others were given sharp, metallic teeth. Bontecou had been struck by the legend of the Bocca della Verita (Mouth of Truth) in Rome: “If you put your hand in and you tell a lie something would bite it off” (Lee Bontecou cited in: Mona Hadler, “Lee Bontecou’s ‘Warnings,’” Art Journal, vol. 53, Winter 1994, p. 57). Artist Joseph Cornell, a friend of Bontecou in the early 1960s, noted in a 1962 journal entry that “in other days there were the ‘mouth of truth’ and the ‘lion’s mouth’ of the Venetian Inquisitions, then, there is the terror of the yawning mouths of canons, of volcanic craters, of windows opened to receive your flight without return, and the jaws of great beasts; and now we have Lee’s warnings” (Joseph Cornell cited in: Ibid., p. 56).
