PERSONAL ABSTRACTIONS

Since the 1960s and early 1970s when Lee Bontecou was actively exhibiting her work in New York and elsewhere, other artists have admired, absorbed, and found like sensibilities in it. This exhibition put Diana Cooper’s and Gay Outlaw’s work in the context of Lee Bontecou’s sculptures from the ‘60s while proposing a reconsideration of Bontecou’s presence and influence on subsequent generations of artists.

Both contemporary artists use everyday materials in formally inventive ways and have developed very personal, and varyingly abstract, vocabularies. Gay Outlaw is a California-based artist who balances formal rigor with organic forms and often visceral materials. She exhibited a monumental sculptural work titled Black Hose Mountain, an elegant yet aggressive piece made from stacked dishwasher tubing filled with plaster.

Often using bio-mechanical iconography and everyday materials such as paper, pipe cleaners, and mylar, Diana Cooper’s work occupies a space between drawing and sculpture. Cooper created a new installation specifically for SculptureCenter’s project room. Titled Missed Once, it sprung from a body of work that continues to playfully explore notions of abstraction and permanence, asymmetry and balance.

The Artists:

Lee Bontecou was one of America’s most acclaimed artists of the 1960’s exhibiting throughout the United States and Europe. One of the few women artists to rise to prominence in the period, Bontecou showed with Leo Castelli’s Gallery and was included in such important group exhibitions as Documenta III (Kassel, Germany), as well as MoMA’s “Americans 1963” and “The Art of Assemblage” (1961). She currently lives in western Pennsylvania. Gay Outlaw lives and works in San Francisco and has exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Refusalon), and Rare Art (New York). Diana Cooper is a New York based artist who has exhibited at Postmasters Gallery (New York), P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (Long Island City), and Hales Gallery (London).

Pressetext

PERSONAL ABSTRACTIONS

mit Lee Bontecou, Gay Outlaw, Diana Cooper