The Apartment
Projects
Lee Lozano.
April – June, 2009
The Apartment is ecstatic to present an exhibition of late works by Lee Lozano. These “Word Pieces”, created between 1968 and 1972, mark her move from painting to the dematerialized strategies that completely integrated art with her life. Diarist in pitch, these conceptual works poetically reveal the social anxiety and compulsive indulgence that oscillates through contemporary life.
Emerging in the frenetic New York avant-garde of 1962, Lozano displayed utter disregard for current aesthetics while maintaining a dialogue with the most influential artists of her generation (including Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, and Lucy Lippard). Starting in 62, half a decade before Phillip Guston, her figurative colored pencil drawings and oil paintings pictured the grotesque and uncanny first through sarcastic graphic text and depictions of castrated genitilia then phallic faced fascist which evolved into a series of threatening anthropomorphic hand tools. These dark quotidian metaphors for the repulsive objectification of human relations led to abstract works including large joined canvases which captured the intense power of these threatening tools in abstract form. Through out her decade long career, Lozano was persistent in her hilarious, graphically honest imaging. Thick with an anxious and abusive sexuality the work insists on revealing the underside, the sublimated and thus the uncanny.
This obsessive immersion in the subjects of everyday life manifested fully in the late “Word Pieces”, essentially texts which give instruction for and often documented the irreverent social experiments performed in her daily activity. Beginning no later then 1968 (the works were conceived largely in private and enacted on the public) the project lead to her eventual and complete disassociation with the art world. Through the reductive aesthetics of conceptual art Lozano attacked the conceit of a purely expressionist art practice, immersed in the brutal actuality of existence. The exhibition will include 16 of these powerful and revelatory works. In her time Lozano exhibited in the most important spaces in New York including the Green Gallery (1964, 65) and the Whitney Museum of Art (1970) and has received a serious rediscovery over the past five years including survey exhibitions at PS1, NY (2004), and Kunsthalle Basel and Kunsthalle Wien (2006). We would like to extend our deep gratitude to the Barry Rosen, Jaap Von Liere and Hauser and Wirth, Zurich/London for making this exhibition a reality.
Please join us for an opening reception on Friday April 3 from 8-10pm.
