Ortuzar and Marc Selwyn Fine Art, with Bill Maynes, are pleased to feature a solo presentation of sculptures, wall reliefs, and works on paper by American artist Lee Bontecou (1931–2022).

Over six decades, Bontecou pioneered a distinct formal language, employing industrial and organic materials to create hybrid forms that evoke machines, biological entities or scientific models. The centerpiece of the presentation is a monumental hanging sculpture––one of only three she produced at such a scale; the other two being held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Created over the course of more than two decades, Untitled (1980–2001) was first unveiled in her 2003 retrospective at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, which subsequently traveled to the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. A selection of Bontecou’s renowned wall reliefs, soot-drawings, sculptures and works on paper will also be exhibited in dialogue to form the first solo presentation of Bontecou’s work in New York since her passing in 2022.

Throughout her career and across mediums, Bontecou visualized otherworldly landscapes through a complex spatial logic of protruding planes, radiating centers of gravity and ominous voids. In Untitled, she pushes these ideas further, transforming steel, wire and fabric into an intricate assemblage evocative of a solar system or sea creature. The suspended sculpture is over seven feet wide and comprised of metal armatures, translucent mesh and silk sails that radiate around porcelain orbs and plates. The work distills Bontecou’s long-standing preoccupations with outer space, industrial mechanics, quantum physics, war and marine life into a form that feels both manmade and resolutely alien. Its prolonged date range—from the 1980s to the early 2000s—reflects the artist’s time-consuming process of crafting each component by hand: welding metal frameworks, firing porcelain and stitching fabric. Also on view are related sculptural works in which the artist hones in on figurative forms that appear skeletal or insect-like, emphasizing the tension and delicacy within the artist’s formal language.

Early works on view further illuminate Bontecou’s longstanding engagement with materiality, space and structure. An untitled example from 1959, is also on view––one of her earliest explorations in this format. In these three-dimensional voids, the artist conjures metaphors for the sublime, fear and the infinite unknown. The 1959 wall relief exhibited here exemplifies these themes, with a deep central void framed by taut wires and sutured fabric, simulating both geological formations and cosmic phenomena.

Lee Bontecou was born in 1931 in Providence, Rhode Island. She attended the Art Students League of New York in the early 1950s, where she studied sculpture under William Zorach. She developed her skills in welding and casting at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1954 and, from 1956 to 1958, she studied in Rome through a Fulbright fellowship. In 1960, the Leo Castelli Gallery presented Bontecou’s first solo exhibition in New York, which led to numerous exhibitions including: Americans 1963, Museum of Modern Art, New York (1963); Lee Bontecou in Retrospect, Hathron Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (1977); Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, (2003–2004); and Drawn Worlds, The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas (2013). In 2019, Bontecou was awarded the Gold Medal for Sculpture by The American Academy of Arts and Letters.