Lee Bontecou

Lee Bontecou was an American artist, who is best known for the pioneering abstract wall sculptures with which she made her name in the 1960s. ‘I just got tired of sculpture as a big thing in the middle of a room,’ she said. Bontecou also produced a vast body of drawings across her career.

She was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1931. She went on to study at the Art Students League in New York and the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where she learned how to weld.

Bontecou became one of the first women to exhibit at the influential Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, whose roster of artists also included Cy Twombly, Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg. Following her debut solo show there in 1960, Art in America magazine dubbed her ‘the find of the year’.

It was in this period that Bontecou created her famed wall-mounted reliefs. These consist of large scraps of canvas stretched over a welded steel frame and sewn together with wire. Typically, they also include beguiling cavities which open onto pitch-black interiors. In 2021, one such relief, Untitled (1959–60), sold for US$9,176,500 at Christie’s — setting a record for the highest price ever paid for a work by Bontecou at auction.

Over time, the artist began incorporating other elements into the surfaces of these sculptures. Part of a World War II bomber, for example, in the case of a huge wall relief she produced in 1964 for the lobby of the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center.

In the early 1970s, Bontecou turned to making sculptures of fish and flowers from vacuum-formed plastic. Thereafter she retreated from the art scene, leaving New York to live with her family on a farm in Pennsylvania.

A major retrospective of her work was organised between 2003 and 2004 by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. This exhibition, which also travelled to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, was the subject of considerable media attention. It included a plethora of previously unseen sculptures and drawings, which Bontecou had produced in isolation in Pennsylvania.

Chief among these were a number of intricate, brooch-like sculptures suspended from the ceiling. These feature a constellation of elements, including porcelain orbs that resemble eyeballs. Bontecou died in 2022, aged 91.