Eleventh Stone

The imagery in Eleventh Stone is directly related to a group of striped and billowing colored relief sculptures Bontecou produced in 1966, made of welded steel, epoxy, fiberglass, and canvas. They resemble parts of windblown airships or the hard, curving shell of a mollusk. Bontecou was ultimately dissatisfied with the qualityof the printing of Eleventh Stone. Printing is a collaborative process between the artist and the printer, and, in the case of Eleventh Stone, she explained that she “wasn’t happy with the printing. I know that when I did them, they weren’t clogged looking. I just know that something happened to the [lithographic] stones. They were all right when we started. [They] should have come out with more gradations, like the flower.”