The first survey of more than fifty years of drawing by a legendary sculptor and draftswoman Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) established a significant reputation in the 1960s with pioneering sculptures and reliefs made of raw and expressionistic materials. Her art is simultaneously organic and mechanical, and infused with biological, geological, and technological motifs. These same qualities also animate a less-known but compelling body of work: her drawings. Ranging from her early soot on paper works created using powder from a welding torch to recent drawings in pencil and colored pencil that evoke cosmoses and microcosmic worlds, this stunning book is the first retrospective survey of Bontecou's consistently innovative drawings. More than sixty full-color plates, populated by imagery ranging from black voids to mechanomorphs to hybrid descendants of teeth, plants, and fish, are complemented by original essays from leading scholars who explore themes such as the drawings' historical contexts, Bontecou's use of the iconography of the void, and the eco-apocalyptic themes of an artist who came of age in the roiling political atmosphere of the 1960s. Distributed for The Menil Collection Exhibition Schedule: The Menil Collection, Houston (01/31/14-05/11/14) Princeton University Art Museum (06/28/14-09/21/14)

Since the 1960s, American artist Lee Bontecou has been internationally praised for her intriguing sculptures and installations. The rich, organic shapes of her sculptures seem to originate from a mysterious universe in which man's fears and desires are condensed. Recently the artist created Sandbox, a new installation in which she combines elements from her work from the 1960s to the present. A picture essay by Joan Banach, artist and friend of Bontecou, focuses on the genesis of Sandbox and maps the rich network of Bontecou's inspirations: pictures range from extracts from geological and historical books to images of works by old masters. The beautiful, detailed photographs were taken at the artist's studio. This publication also shows Bontecou's sketchbooks and the inspirational ?wall of drawings? in her studio. It is an intimate insight into the creative process of the artist. Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands, 25 February - 2 July 2017.

In America during the 1960s, sculpture as an artistic practice underwent a series of radical transformations. Artists including Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, H. C. Westermann, and Bruce Nauman offered alternative ways of imagining the three-dimensional object. The objects they created were variously described as erotic, soft, figurative, aggressive, bodily, or, in the words of the critic Lucy Lippard, "eccentric." Looking beyond the familiar and canonic artworks of the 1960s, the book challenges not only how we think about these artists, but how we learn to look at the more familiar narratives of 1960s sculpture, such as Pop and Minimalism. Ambivalent and disruptive, the work of this decade articulated a radical renegotiation—rejection, even—of contemporary paradigms of sculptural practice. This invigorating study explores that shift and the ways in which the kinds of work made in this period defied established categories and questioned the criteria for thinking about sculpture.

Text by Elisabeth Sussman.

This collection of drawings was acquired by MOMA in 2005, and it as an extraordinary collection of over 2,500 works on paper. This exhibition presents over 300 of these works and includes a number of works that use collage, assemblage, appropriation and montage.