Lee Lozano: Lean, 1966
Lee Lozano: No Title, circa 1964—1965
Lee Lozano: Drawings & Paintings at Hauser & Wirth Hauser & Wirth presents ‘Lee Lozano. Drawings & Paintings’, an exhibition that brings together a group of works from years of 1964 and 1965, a critical time of development for the artist. 14 May – 31 July 2015.]]>
Source: Hauser & Wirth
Lozano’s art, produced over the course of little more than a decade, is striking for its breadth and energy, and admired for its daring physicality and tirelessness in investigating the body and issues of gender. In short, Lozano’s oeuvre comprises a search for a truly authentic form of expression. Standing apart from the detached and rarified conceptual art of her time, Lozano merged art and life, images and ideas together, in works characterized by a unique use of paint, language, and action.
Central to the exhibition are five-large scale paintings, each titled after a verb – ‘Pitch’, ‘Slide’, ‘Lean’, ‘Swap’, and ‘Cram’. Rendered in dark, smoky tones and lustrous metallic colors, these nearly abstracted canvases are visual distillations of force. Insistently physical, pigment and pencil are felt as solid matter and concentrated energy. They emerged from Lozano’s renowned ‘Tool Paintings’ of the early 60s, which depict screwdrivers, bolts, wrenches, clamps, and hammers so anthropomorphized that they appear to be objects in sexualized motion. However, in the canvases on view at Hauser & Wirth, the provocative and aggressive emotional intensity has shifted away from figuration and derives instead from the extraordinary way in which Lozano worked.
In the verb paintings, the hard edges of the Lozano’s tools have morphed into optically complex geometricforms; their punning, overtly sexual connotations are concentrated here into a profound investigation ofmatter. Using three-inch housepainters’ brushes to create a finely ridged, slightly reflective surface, Lozanoconveys the shape and directional thrust of her forms and suggests a full-bodied physicality. ‘It’s not justsurface roundness that turns me on’, she wrote in 1968, ‘it’s the feeling of density, mass and weight’. In suchworks as ‘Slide’ (1965) and ‘Lean’ (1965), Lozano has literally clamped her canvases together, compoundingtheir physicality along the straight, sharp geometric lines where form and color converge. Employing oil paintfor its rich, tactile, and sensual qualities, Lozano achieves thick monochromatic fields of color, renderingimages that teeter between three-dimensional spatiality and the planar two-dimensional surface. The verbpaintings balance illusionist impressions with sharp points, angles, and spiraling cone-shaped forms.
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