"I like space that never stops. Black is like that. Holes and boxes mean secrets and shelter."
S uturing canvas, wire, and welded steel, Lee Bontecou’s Untitled of 1959 captures the artist’s tireless interrogation of the cosmos and dimensionality on an intimate scale. The cavernous aperture punctuating the center of the present work cleaves open new possibilities of how to represent the discontent of her t.mes : having experienced the tenuous mid-century history of the Cold War, Space Race, and nuclear paranoia, Bontecou created assemblages, wall reliefs, and box constructions as precarious and harrowing as the present she inhabited. Struck simultaneously by fascination and fear with contemporary scientific advances, the unfamiliar, uncanny, and the extraordinary find home in a new kind of apocalyptic beauty, one that conjures the insidious consequences of modernity. Test.mes nt to Untitled’s importance in the artist’s oeuvre, the present work was notably featured in the artist’s critically acclaimed 2003-04 retrospective presented at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
With Bontecou's mother, a worker in a World War II submarine factory wiring transmitters, and her father, the inventor of an all-aluminum canoe, the artist descends from a lineage of skilled technicians. She emerged onto the New York art scene of the 1960s in the wake of Abstract Expressionism’s heyday. Instead of pursuing the Pop and Minimalist vernacular of her contemporaries, however, Bontecou constructed a layered visual lexicon that was entirely her own, one which married her personal fascination with outer space and grappled with a fraught world order that repeatedly tested and questioned the value of artmaking. The only female artist to be represented by legendary gallerist Leo Castelli, Bontecou consciously challenged the macho spirit of her New York School predecessors and the rote masculinity of Minimalist sculpture. “I just got tired of sculpture as a big thing in the middle of a room,” the artist reflected. “I wanted it to go into space.” (the artist in: Paul Trachtman, “Lee Bontecou’s Brave New World,” Smithsonian Magazine, September 2004 (online)) The body of work that resulted – organic yet.mes chanical, dainty yet daunting – would crystallize for posterity the anxiety, the uncertainty, and the explosive technological growth she would witness in her lifet.mes .
“I just got tired of sculpture as a big thing in the middle of a room. I wanted it to go into space.”
Celebrated for their unsettling use, manipulation, and creation of space, the present work is not only an armature but a complex feat of engineering, architecture, and singular ingenuity. At once born from a recognizable world and a portal to another, Untitled, without fear, wholly embraces the otherworldly.
