Lee Bontecou
The Village Voice
Best in Show: Lee Bontecou at FreedmanArt, by Robert Shuster
November 9, 2011
For more than half a century, Lee Bontecou has been peering into the cosmos. Her famously imposing three-dimensional vortexes of the early 1960s—grungy swaths of canvas stitched onto spiraling armatures—grabbed your attention with the gravitational strength of black holes.
ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany
Lee Bontecou: Insights, ZKM
May 27th, 2011
For the first time in thirty years and to mark the occasion of her 80th birthday, the work of US-American artist Lee Bontecou is to be honored by an exhibition held at the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition provides insights into the Bontecou’s innovative work of the 1960s.
ARTnews
Lee Bontecou at FreedmanArt, by Barbara Pollack
January 1, 2012
Sailing into the future with a fleet of fantastic mobiles , this magnificent exhibition would indicate that Lee Bontecou has no intention of slowing down. The works here are at once delicate and powerful, modernist and contemporary, serene and frightening. It is a difficult balance, but Bontecou handles the contradictions with a masterful use of unconventional materials.
The New York Times
Art in Review: Lee Bontecou, by Ken Johnson
December 15, 2011
Now 80, Lee Bontecou has traveled a long way since her militaristic reliefs of bent rods, wire and canvas made her famous in the late 1950s and ’60s. In subsequent decades she traded brutalist confrontation for formal delicacy and mental travel into fabulous other universes.
The New Criterion
Gallery Chronicle: Lee Bontecou, by James Panero
February 1, 2012
Finally this month offers up our last chance to see the art world’s original alternative in her current show. Lee Bontecou always refused to be taken in. After bursting onto the scene in the 1960’s with her singular and haunting wall sculptures of layered canvases, often stitched around gaping voids, she retreated entirely from public view. Yet she never stopped making art. Now in her eighties, she is as inventive and singular as ever. Her exhibition of drawings and sculptures on view at FreedmanArt through February 11 is not to be missed.
The New Yorker
Lee Bontecou, Goings on About Town: Art
February 7, 2012
The great, uncategorizable American sculptor, now eighty-one, continues to surprise and enchant. Dirigible-like forms hang from the ceiling, dangling beaded tails. Two sandboxes, of the type the artist uses in her Pennsylvania studio to experiment with the arrangement of objects – feathers, shells, animal skeletons fashioned from porcelain, serpentine forms made of mesh- are being exhibited here for the first time.
The Wall Street Journal
Abstract (Semi) and Phantasmagorical, by Peter Plagens
December 24, 2011
The centerpieces of this gallery exhibition are four hanging sculptures, each about a yard long, that look like amalgams of clipper ships and jellyfish. They’re ingeniously balanced with hanging fishing weights of different sizes and shapes. The nice touch of dirtying up the rear surfaces of the mobiles’ “sails” adds to their feeling of soaring optimistically through the air. But the nicest touch is simply Ms. Bontecou’s matchless deftness in combining volumetric and linear form to wring an awful lot of emotive response from nothing but untitled things.
The Menil Collection
Lee Bontecou: Drawn Worlds, A Retrospective of Drawings by Lee Bontecou, January 25 - May 18, 2014
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Spanning over 50 years, the career of American artist Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) has been defined by her pioneering sculptures of fiberglass, cloth and rubber stretched over metal armatures. Shown at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1960, her work was praised by artist Donald Judd as powerful, awesome, menacing and entirely unique. Less known, her drawings are an equally vital component of her work, a form of making she continues to produce, and a practice that forcefully reveals the artist’s importance within the history of art.