Michael Rosenfeld Gallery mourns the loss of incomparable artist and friend Lee Bontecou (January 15, 1931–November 8, 2022).

Longtime champions of her bold and courageous oeuvre, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has featured Bontecou in eighteen exhibitions, including True Grit (2000), [un]common threads (2008), and Art of Defiance: Radical Materials (2019). In 2002, Michael Rosenfeld and halley k harrisburg spent a long weekend with Bontecou at her rural Pennsylvania farmhouse, deepening their commitment to her work. harrisburg remembers the experience as, “Truly one of the most memorable and influential artist experiences of my career! From sleeping in the attic guest quarters to exploratory walks in her surrounding woods; dining by candlelight listening to stories of childhood summers in Nova Scotia fly-fishing with her elders, to unpressured time in her light-filled studio where the natural world harmoniously balanced with her creative output. Everywhere, I saw beauty and decay, hope and fear. It has been—and will remain—a priority to further her legacy.” We are profoundly saddened by the loss of a true artistic genius, and we extend our heartfelt condolences to her family.

Bontecou was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island, where her mother worked in a factory wiring submarine parts during World War II. The circumstances of her mother’s vocation combined with news reports of the war and the Holocaust had a formative effect on the young artist, whose understanding of the era’s sociopolitical climate as well as her preoccupation with the industrial horrors of the modern age would later inform her work. Bontecou also developed a deep appreciation for the natural world during childhood—a result of summers spent in her mother’s native Nova Scotia, where she became especially fascinated with marine life. From 1953 to 1958, she attended the Art Students League in New York, studying with William Zorach and George Grosz, among others. Bontecou first learned to weld in a 1954 summer course at the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. She further honed her metalworking skills two years later while in Italy on a Fulbright scholarship from 1956–57, where she developed a novel drawing technique using an acetylene torch. By turning down the torch’s oxygen, Bontecou discovered a way to create drawings from soot, leading to the first compositions she referred to as “worldscapes”: drawings in which “velvety black forms graduate slowly and atmospherically toward a horizon.” This anticipated, as art historian Mona Hadler points out, “Bontecou’s arresting amalgamations of two-and three-dimensional elements” in her earliest wall reliefs. Bontecou returned to New York in 1958 and began to translate the formal ideas expressed in these drawings into three dimensions, creating the large, raw, wall-mounted assemblages that often feature a central gaping black hole opening on to a black velvet backdrop, evoking a literal and existential abyss. These would become some of her most well-known motifs and marked the artists entrée to critical and commercial success.

Bontecou enjoyed a steady stream of accolades throughout the following decade, beginning with her first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960. A year later, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York purchased Untitled (1961), a large-scale relief fabricated from canvas, rope, and wire in which the central hole grimaces with “teeth” sourced from the blade of a band saw. That same year, her work was included in William Seitz’s historic exhibition The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art. By 1963, MoMA had also acquired one of her works and she was commissioned by the architect Philip Johnson to create what would be the largest sculpture of her career for the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. Bontecou also participated in the Bienal de São Paulo in 1963 and, in 1964, she and Louise Bourgeois were the only two women chosen to represent North America in Documenta III in Kassel, Germany. Her success in these years garnered the attention of the most influential critics of the era, including a young Donald Judd, who, in the mid-1960s deemed her “one of the best artists working anywhere,” describing her wall reliefs as “a three-dimensional form that was neither painting nor sculpture”—an exemplary instance of his newly developed concept of the “specific object.”

In the 1970s, Bontecou began a nearly twenty-year teaching career at Brooklyn College (CUNY). It was during this decade that the imagery of her work shifted to resemble botanical and marine life, which she often rendered using vacuum-formed plastic. This turn marked a particularly strident moment in the artist’s career-spanning criticism of humans’ ongoing destruction of the environment. In 1971, these sculptures were exhibited at Leo Castelli Gallery, in what would be her last solo exhibition in New York for nearly thirty years. In 1972, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago organized a survey exhibition of her work. Ensuing frustration with the demands of the art market and a rapidly changing social landscape in Downtown Manhattan led Bontecou to detach herself from the New York art world later in the 1970s. Retreating to the peaceful environs of her Pennsylvania farm, she devoted herself to teaching and raising her daughter. Though she declined to exhibit her work for many years after leaving the city, she continued to expand and evolve her oeuvre, turning her attention to a series of ceiling-mounted sculptures comprising a welded frame embedded with handmade porcelain elements throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Bontecou enjoyed a revival in mainstream institutional and critical attention in the 1990s and 2000s, when a series of well-received exhibitions reignited interest in her work.  

Throughout her career Bontecou resolutely insisted that her works possess no fixed meaning and are intended to elicit a range of associations; her precise, utterly unique works investigate a rich array of scientific and philosophical concepts, from the humanist trauma of ecological collapse, to the awesome visions of space age exploration, to the resonances between microbiology and celestial phenomena. As she explained in a 1993 correspondence with art historian Elizabeth A.T. Smith, “My most persistently recurring thought is to work in a scope as far-reaching as possible; to express a feeling of freedom in all its necessary ramifications – its awe, beauty, magnitude, horror and baseness. This feeling embraces ancient, present and future worlds: from caves to jet engines, landscapes to outer space, from visible nature to the inner eye, all encompassed in cohesive works of my inner world. This total freedom is essential.”