Lee Bontecou

Painting or sculpture? Organic or industrial? Invitation or threat? This untitled work is a rectangle of canvas, like a painting, but one that pushes its faceted, equivocally machinelike mouth out from the wall. Many have seen in Bontecou’s works of this kind, with their built-up rims and hollow voids, the nacelles or casings of jet engines. The artist, too, has acknowledged their influence: “Airplanes at one time, jets mainly,” she said, in answer to an interviewer’s question about the inspiration for her work. Interest in the streamlined products of modernity may link Bontecou to Pop art, a movement that was developing in the early 1960s, but her work’s dark and restricted palette gives it a sobriety distant from much of Pop, and she describes the world more obliquely. Also, instead of replicating an engine’s metallic surfaces, she has stitched panels of canvas over a steel skeleton. If this is a machine, it is a soft one—which, again, leads many to think of the body and its charged interiors and openings.

Mystery is one quality Bontecou is interested in, as well as “fear, hope, ugliness, beauty.” As for those inky cavities, a consistent theme, she has remarked, “I like space that never stops. Black is like that. Holes and boxes mean secrets and shelter.”