Lee Bontecou - Drawings 1958-1999

Knoedler & Company is pleased to announce the opening of Lee Bontecou: Drawings 1958 – 1999 , our inaugural presentation of her work.

The exhibition consists of thirty–seven works on paper in a wide variety of materials — among them soot, graphite, charcoal, colored pencil, pastel, printer's ink, and casein — chronicling Bontecou's career–long involvement with drawing as a medium independent of, yet parallel to, her sculptural work.

An important breakthrough in Bontecou's work occurred through a synthesis of her welding process and drawing: she used the very black settling (or soot) from an oxyacetylene torch in a series of early (1958) drawings, two of which are included in the exhibition.

Bontecou has described her drawings as "worldscapes", or "worldspaces." Once dubbed a "strange naturalist," she takes inspiration from the natural world — both macrocosmic and microcosmic. Beginning in the 1980s, variations on a painterly wave form, sometimes executed in pastel, entered her oeuvre.

Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) is currently the subject of a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and UCLA Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles. It will be on view in New York at The Museum of Modern Art, Queens from July 28 through September 27, 2004.

An illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition. Pressetext

Lee Bontecou - Drawings 1958 – 1999