LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.- Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective is the most comprehensive exhibition ever assembled of this influential 20th century American artist-one of the few women artists to receive major recognition in the 1960s. Co-organized by the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the exhibition features 72 sculptures and 84 drawings from private and public collections as well as from the artist’s own holdings. It documents the complexity and scope of Bontecou’s art, from the late 1950s through 2003, with many works that have rarely or never before been publicly shown during the past 30 years.

Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective is curated by Elizabeth A.T. Smith, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in conjunction with Ann Philbin, Director of the UCLA Hammer Museum. The exhibition opens at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles on October 5, 2003, and remains on view through January 11, 2004. It will be presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, from February 14 through May 30, 2004, and will travel to MoMA QNS, New York, from July 30 through September 27, 2004.

"Lee Bontecou has influenced generations of artists. This exhibition will reassess her early works while bringing more recent, completely unknown work of the last 30 years to light," said Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum. "This retrospective spans five decades of Bontecou’s contribution to American art-it celebrates her achievement, her life, and the full range of her artistic genius."

The exhibition is sponsored by Altria Group, Inc. The national tour is made possible by The Henry Luce Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Friedrike Merck, and Sarah-Ann and Werner H. Kramarsky. The accompanying catalogue was made possible, in part, by Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, and The Ruth and Murray Gribin Foundation. The Chicago presentation is generously sponsored by the Sara Lee Foundation.

Sandra Blau, director, contributions, Altria Corporate Services, Inc. in California, said "We have seen through our long-term sponsorship of the arts that the arts serve as important anchors in the economic and social well-being of communities. Altria Group is pleased to sponsor the Hammer Museum’s exhibition of works by one of the most compelling contemporary artists in our country."

Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) created a strikingly innovative body of work, including large and small-scale sculptures and drawings in a range of media. The work that brought Bontecou early critical attention-created between 1959 and approximately 1967-incorporates her pioneering technique of stretching canvas over welded metal armatures to create wall reliefs that are both painting and sculpture.

Bontecou enjoyed early success in the art world, and her work quickly entered major museum and private collections. Her first one-person exhibition took place in 1960 at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, where she was the only female artist among a group that included Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Jasper Johns and James Rosenquist. She was represented in several exhibitions in the early 1960s at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, including Americans, 1963, and had a 1972 mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Despite immediate recognition for her work, Bontecou began to withdraw from the New York art scene at the height of her fame in the early 1970s following her last solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1971. Little of her subsequent work has been seen in the past 30 years.

Bontecou was a faculty member of the art department at Brooklyn College, where she taught until her retirement in 1991. Throughout her teaching career, she worked in seclusion at her studio in rural Pennsylvania-where she continues to live and work today. Renewed interest in Bontecou’s art was sparked by a 1993 exhibition of her sculpture and drawings at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, also curated by Elizabeth Smith. The enigmatic Bontecou always worked free from the influence of other artists, while being greatly admired by generations of art students as well as prominent artists including Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Charles Ray, Nancy Rubins and Kiki Smith. "Bontecou is one of the best artists working anywhere," Judd wrote as a critic for Arts magazine in 1965, noting her ability to address "something as social as war to something as private as sex, making one an aspect of the other."

Arranged loosely by chronology, the exhibition provides an unprecedented look at Lee Bontecou’s oeuvre by interweaving approximately 125 sculptures and drawings dating from 1957 to the present. During the past three decades Bontecou produced a significant body of sculptures and drawings that are highlighted alongside seminal earlier works. Although often abstract, these works reveal Bontecou’s unique artistic vocabulary of forms incorporating a range of natural as well as mechanistic references. Her imagery and subjects range from the dark orifices of her earliest pieces-suggestive of war, violence, nature and the cosmos-to a pronounced ecological emphasis in her sculptures of flowers, fish and birds, to her recent preoccupation with forms resembling celestial bodies.

"The pieces included in this exhibition all demonstrate persistent characteristics of Bontecou’s work, that of a deep sense of interconnection and mutability between abstraction and forms found in nature, as well as the recurrences of certain motifs that have preoccupied and fascinated Bontecou over decades," said Elizabeth Smith, the exhibition curator. "Her work has always elicited a wide spectrum of readings, reactions and responses. It is unsettling, otherworldly, surreal and fundamentally mysterious."
Examples of Bontecou’s bronze and terracotta figurative pieces of fantastical birds and animals, created in the 1950s, open the exhibition. These early works, while figurative and traditional in nature, already show a tendency towards the abstract, as demonstrated by the bronze sculpture, Untitled, 1957. Bontecou maintains this balance between abstraction and representation throughout her career.

The exhibition continues with some of Bontecou’s most recognized works, created between 1959 and 1967. These compelling signature works are primarily wall-mounted, three-dimensional sculptures that juxtapose elements of machines, nature, and the human body. These works were formally groundbreaking, using canvas and other fabrics stretched over welded steel frames. This technique enabled her to create lightweight pieces increasingly large in scale.

Most of the works from this period received instant recognition and were acquired by major institutions and collectors. They are rough and powerful objects alluding to sexuality and violence as much as to machines. Bontecou consistently employs the motif of a dark circular opening in these works, a strong formal element that can be interpreted as biological or cosmological. The presence of these openings-equal parts orifice and void-creates a sense of mystery and genuine darkness as the result of the actual space contained within her three-dimensional objects. Another theme animating Bontecou’s work-war and violence-is expressed in her use of such objects and images as guns, airplane fuselages and other army surplus. Included in the exhibition is a 1959 steel sculpture depicting an abstracted machine gun-a reminder of the effects of Cold-War paranoia on Bontecou.

Drawings included from this early period also show increasing references to airplanes and airplane parts, the wings of birds and other anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic elements. On view are several soot drawings dated between 1962 and 1964. Calling these drawings "worldscapes," Bontecou used an acetylene torch with the oxygen turned low to create mysterious works that are evocative of outer space at a time when she was fascinated by advances in science and space exploration.

The style and intensity of Bontecou’s work shifted after the birth of her daughter in the late 1960s, when she moved away from the dark tonalities and rough, aggressive character of her sculptures in canvas and steel to a gentler aesthetic defined by more naturalistic forms including cocoons, shells, fish and flowers. Her sculpture increasingly referred to nature and biological life-an interest that was first revealed in her earliest cast sculptures of birds and animals. This shift is exemplified in the exhibition by several chrysalis-like hanging sculptures of wood and silk created around 1967. Further evidence of Bontecou’s departure from the rugged textures and receding spaces of her earlier works can be found in a group of drawings from 1964/1965 and 1967/1968 that show ballooning forms that are softer, more finished and protective.

In addition to using natural materials, such as wood and silk, Bontecou began to experiment with plastics, epoxy and other synthetic materials to create molded forms in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Several examples of vacuum-formed plastic flowers and fish are included in the exhibition and reflect Bontecou’s continued search for new materials and techniques while working with recognizable plant and animal imagery. This body of work was inspired by Bontecou’s increasing preoccupation with human degradation of the natural world; her plant and animal forms are sinister and mutated - one even wears a gas mask.

For a period of approximately 15 years beginning in the mid 1970s, Bontecou concentrated on her teaching and family responsibilities, while also continuing to draw and experiment with more intimately scaled sculpture. Drawings completed during this time reveal the wide range of images present in Bontecou’s vocabulary, including flaming meteors or fireballs, insect-like shapes, flowers, plants, eyes and-more recently-waves, landscapes, seascapes and birds.

Perhaps some of the most exciting works in the exhibition are those completed after Bontecou’s retirement from teaching in 1991. During this time, Bontecou returned to some of the sculptures she had started during the 1980s and continued to expand a vocabulary she had first begun to explore in the late 1970s. This part of the exhibition features numerous works from Bontecou’s studio that have never before been exhibited and that reference shapes and forms reminiscent of science fiction. Several intimately-scaled, small porcelain sculptures composed of interlocking parts evocative of outer space and galaxies are exhibited. Also on view are recent suspended porcelain and wire sculptures, explosive and celestial in nature, comprised of orbs and linkages that recall hybrid forms suggestive of something between a helicopter and an insect. In contrast to the rough-hewn appearance of her earlier works, these delicate pieces are extremely intricate, yet they manifest a similarly mysterious character based on forms found in nature.

Drawings play an important role in Bontecou’s oeuvre throughout her career, and those from the late 1990s resonate powerfully with ideas and images expressed in her sculpture. She depicts fantastic landscapes and creatures in colored pencil drawings on paper. Synthesizing figurative, organic and mechanic references, both her sculptures and drawings suggest various states of transformation and transmutation between the natural and the man-made, order and chaos, delicacy and ferocity. Her work manifests an uncommon vibrancy and vitality that resonates with many younger artists, stemming from her ongoing insistence on encompassing, in her words, "as much of life as possible - no barriers - no boundaries - all freedom in every sense."

Accompanying the exhibition will be a fully-illustrated catalogue with essays by Elizabeth Smith, the exhibition curator; Rob Storr, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; Donna De Salvo, Senior Curator at the Tate Modern, London; and art historian, Mona Hadler. The catalogue is published by MCA Chicago and UCLA Hammer Museum in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc. It is the first monograph on Lee Bontecou and offers an extensive analysis of her overall work and her place in 20th century art.

Altria Group, Inc. (NYSE: MO) is the parent company of Kraft Foods Inc., Philip Morris International Inc. and Philip Morris USA Inc. For more than four decades, Altria companies have provided sustained and wide-ranging support of programs that help people in need, enrich communities and promote economic development. As part of this commitment to responsibility, Altria companies have awarded nearly $130 million to arts organizations across the United States in the last decade alone. More information is available at www.altria.com/media_programs, or by contacting Sandra Blau, director, contributions, Altria Corporate Services, Inc. at 916-441-2288 ext. 30, or 800-626-5403 ext. 30.