Fifth Stone

The black hole that appears in so many of Bontecou’s relief sculptures of the early 1960s dominates Fifth Stone, whose monumental size also mimics the artist’s wall reliefs. In the print, however, the black void and its concentric bands fill nearly the entire sheet, suggesting, as one early critic imagined, “wells, tunnels, sequestered and mysterious places . . . [or] the central point around which the cosmos circulates.”