The only woman who showed alongside Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol at Leo Castelli Gallery in the 1960s, Lee Bontecou has been creating a body of work in sculpture, printmaking, and drawing since the late 1950s that has stood apart from the mainstream, yet also shows affinities with other American and European artists of her generation. Marked by an intense materiality, Bontecou’s work points to precedents as diverse as futurism, surrealism, arte povera, and minimalism as well as an unmistakable interest in science and popular culture, which are central interests of generations of younger sculptors.

The relief sculpture Flit is an excellent example of the work Bontecou is best known for. It is an early representative of sculptures—mostly created between 1959 and 1967—that are wall-mounted, three-dimensional objects made from sections of discarded laundry conveyor belts and army surplus goods stretched onto welded frames. With their cubist planes and sharp angles, these works hover on the boundary between painting and sculpture. Climaxing in crater-like cavities that were sometimes lined with black velvet or soot, Bontecou’s wall sculptures seem to give shape to Cold War anxieties coupled with a sense of human fragility. Writing about Bontecou’s work in 1965, fellow sculptor Donald Judd noted its ability to include “something as social as war to something as private as sex, making one an aspect of the other.”