This is not a painting, but a hanging sculpture that juts out 30” from the wall. There’s dark, warlike edge to this steampunk vortex—one of the concentric rings is an industrial saw blade—and there is a sense of falling or being sucked into the maw of some nameless, mechanized future. But it is too elegant and balanced, too curious, to be bereft of positive associations. Bontecou herself wrote of trying to glimpse “the fear, hope, ugliness, beauty and mystery that exist in us all.” There is such gentleness and power combined in that wish, and in this work.

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