Untitled, 1961
- Medium
- Pencil on paper
- Dimensions
- Frame (natural wood): 35 x 49 x 1 1/2 in. (88.9 x 124.46 x 3.81 cm) Image: 27 x 39 in. (68.58 x 99.06 cm)
- Accession Number
- 95.20
- Credit
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Purchase with funds provided by The Gene J. Burton Acquisitions Endowment and Betye M. Burton
In this graphite drawing, Bontecou plays with a motif that recurs in her work of the 1960s in a variety of mediums: the black hole or void. Here, forms that are at once prehistoric and postapocalyptic, recalling spaceships and beetles or eyeballs and camera lenses, emerge from and recede into the nondescript space of the paper sheet. Though Bontecou often cited fascination with the 1957 Sputnik satellite and commonplace Cold War-era fear of nuclear holocaust, she averred that such organic-mechanical hybrids came from her imagination. She credited drawing with getting her “imagination moving,” as “you can work from your inner world rather than always the external world.”