Lee Bontecou....was born in 1931, daughter of a salesman, she studied Art and Metal welding. She was a popular figure in the new York art world from the late 1950s mainly due to her unique constructions, sculptures and intense drawings.
Bontecou was not particularly interested in art until she went to college.
She began experimenting with black in drawings. She began creating soot drawings by employing an acetylene torch but turning down the oxygen to create a uniquely deep black. The black had depth and a velvet look that slowly graduated. The drawings that Bontecou created using this technique were called "worldscapes." This discovery changed the way she looked at her world. In Italy, she also created some animals, birds, and people in semi abstract form primarily in terra cotta but also a few cast in bronze.
She continued to experiment with black in drawings. In the late 1950s and early 1960s she also moved from worldscapes to bigger constructions with black still a key feature. Her first important works in the art world were wall constructions fabricated primarily from found objects, living above a laundry she used worn out laundry conveyor belts made of heavy canvas as well as canvas, muslin, airplane parts, industrial saw tooths and black velvet, Bontecou sewed or constructed these materials together with copper wire on steel frames.
By the early 1960s Bontecou was regarded as a connection between 1950s Abstract Expressionism, pop art and minimalism that was becoming popular in the 1960s. She continued to create constructions, welding frames into shapes and attaching found materials to it. Many of her works in this time period featured handles, grommets, canvas straps, and other materials available at hardware stores and Army surplus stores. Bontecou's works in this time period included "The Prisons," which consisted of small rectangular metal pieces, and 1961's "Untitled," which had iron bars forming a vertical grid with a figure trapped behind them. Museums began buying her work, and she was included in a 1961 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, The Age of Assemblage.
Bontecou's other works in this time period were also influenced by airplanes and their materials. In addition being more streamlined, aerodynamic, and full of metallic elements, many of her canvas works featured panels that were tinted in shades of greys and blacks. She also began using hardwood and was sometimes influenced by architecture. Bontecou's sculptures continued to evolve from the abstract to include plants, insects, and under sea creatures in her forms. Though most of Bontecou's work consisted of constructions she always continued to draw.
Bontecou still showed her work through the early 1970s in New York, by this time she was experimenting with carving objects out of Styrofoam and placing them in a vacuum press, in this process she created plastic fish, flowers, and plants some of which were very large. One work from 1970 featured a plastic fish hanging from the ceiling with the tail of another fish in its mouth. Her comment on the way the world was changing and becoming very plastic was not well received at the time, though this social commentary was later regarded as meaningful, innovative, and political. Her last exhibit for many years came in 1971 and featured the plastic flowers and fish.
Her attitude changed after she suffered a life threatening illness in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She suffered from aplastic anaemia a disease of the bone marrow, but was nursed back to health by her husband. This incident prompted her to assess the whole of her career, her work then featured skulls, skeletal structures, and animal bones in her delicate sculptures of wire, porcelain beads, and cloth with some colour, which she created in her private studio located in a barn on her farm. In 1993 Bontecou's profile was raised when the Los Angeles based Museum of Contemporary Art featured a retrospective of some of her work from the 1960s and 1970s, both reliefs and drawings that later moved to the Parrish Art Museum. It was her first show in many years. Bontecou did not organize it and none of her post early 1970s work was included. At the time she was adamant about not displaying her "new" work. The drawings involved strange jumblings of serene and
sinister, sensual and clinical, comical and foreboding, and all reflected Bontecou's odd penchant for mixing feminine with masculine and hybridizing attributes of the natural with those of the machine made and the machine itself."
Bontecou's work was described as ( sui generis ) entirely her own, in its constant oscillation between abstract and figurative, toughness and lyricism, the intimate and the infinite, the natural world and the world of her imagination.
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