After Lee's gallery, we went across the museum and check out Roger Hior's work - he takes metal objects (like this BMW 7-Series engine) and dips them in a copper-sulfate bath
...but then I got caught taking sneaky pics and I had to put my camera away. Her most recent sculpture is some of the most beautiful, striking art I've ever seen and I the exhibit completely overwhelmed. I think I heard that this entire 150+ piece show is coming to New York City this summer - if it does, you should go see it.
On Friday morning, Jordana (who is a painter) took me to the Hammer Museum to see Lee Bontecou's "Retrospective." Here's a cool, drippy permanent installation in the museum's lobby.
I managed to capture a few pics of these scultpures from the mid-seventies, where she was going through a period of creating all these crazy, Egyptian scarab beetle-like scultures...
These pics are all sorta shitty and totally don't do her work justice - they're absolutely striking in person. (You're not supposed to take pics in the museam and I was forced to snap all these ninja style when the guards weren't looking.) Anyway, towards the end of the 60s, Lee started moving away from the scary-looking scultures that she was known for and started more organic flower-like sculptures that were met with tepid critical reactions. So in the early 70s she stopped exhibiting and pretty much dropped out of the art scene. Well it turns out she's spent the last thirty years working and all of the stuff she'd been working on (that nobody's seen until just recently) is completely amazing.
I love going to museums, but enjoy them infinitely more if I'm there with someone who knows alot about what we're seeing and can contextualize it for me. Jordana is one of those people.