Trained in Chicago, Lee Lozano became an activist icon of the New York scene during the 1960s and was a member of the international art world from 1960 to 1972. It was a short, intense and dazzling career, which she chose to end with the work General Strike Piece (1969), her artistic legacy. Strongly influenced by the predominantly male artistic environment of the time, she produced drawings she referred to as comix, in which she ironically transformed “virile” symbols and attributes - such as screws, hammers, bit-braces and monkey wrenches - into phallic forms in a generalized eroticization of objects. Revisiting the clichés of conceptual art and the pop and schematized graphics of Claes Oldenburg, Lozano threw a cutting and provocative look at the disagreements and dissension that marked the artistic debate at the time. Behind its apparently affective distance, her graphical work was no less shot through with proclaimed violence and a strong emotional charge. Painting occupied an important place in her work. In 1964 she exhibited with the most influential artists of the time, such as Robert Morris and Donald Judd, at the Green Gallery. Producing large canvases, she navigated between the precision of minimalism and the power of abstract expressionism. Championed initially by feminist critics and in particular by Lucy Lippard*, in 1971 she brusquely turned away from feminism and women in general, just a few months before her withdrawal from the art world. It was above all due to her inflexible commitment and attitudes that Lee Lozano’s name was not forgotten. Although her plastic work long remained in the shadows following her deliberate self-alienation, it was recently given a large retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Claire BICKERT
