Powerful Void: Inside the Art of Lee Bontecou
In many ways, her work prefigures the contemporary preoccupation with the anthropocene
When I was a teenager, I saw this piece at MoMA for the first time and it took my breath away. At the time, I was doing some welding and had this idea to stretch fabric inside planes created by a metal armature. When I saw that Lee Bontecou had already done it, I knew two things. First, I knew I never had to stretch fabric inside a metal armature; Lee Bontecou had already done it better than I ever could. Second, I knew that I wanted to learn everything I could about this artist. This was before her art world “rediscovery” and major retrospective in 2003, so what I learned was that she had had early success with these relief sculptures in the 1960s and then disappeared.
She hadn’t really disappeared of course. But she did leave her gallery, move out to the country, and ignore curators who tried to reach out to her for over two decades. And so as far as the art world was concerned, she might as well have been living on Mars.
Lee Bontecou was born Jan 15, 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island. She grew up in Westchester, New York, and spent summers with her grandmother…
