Welded steel, canvas, black fabric, soot, and wire
Made in 1959, the year Bontecou created her first wall-mounted steel-and-canvas sculptures, this work incorporates soiled canvas taken from conveyor belts discarded by a laundry below the artist's East Village apartment. She stretched pieces of the fabric across sections of steel armature and fastened them to the metal with wire, creating a surface resembling something between a stained glass window and a patchwork quilt. While her early reliefs conjure a wide range of associations, this particular one resembles, among other things, an aerial view of an otherworldly landscape. Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, had recently orbited the earth, launching the Space Age. As Bontecou later recalled of this time, "I had a joy and excitement about outer space—nothing was known about the black holes—just huge, intangible, dangerous entities, and I felt great excitement when little Sputnik flew."
Lee Bontecou: All Freedom in Every Sense, April 21–August 30, 2010 .
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The Art of Assemblage
Gallery 408Everyday objects, popular consumer products, and other nontraditional materials had become, Seitz wrote, “the language for impatient, hypercritical, and anarchistic young artists,” who sought to create an art that—in its subject matter, materials, and making—was closely intertwined with life.
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