Lot 102
Lee Knaster Lozano
New York, New Jersey, (1930 - 1999)
untitled, 1964
graphite and crayon paper
Signed upper right. Gallery label verso. Art Forum featured.
Exhibited: Van Liere Fine Art, NY
Biography from the Archives of askART: Born Lenore Knaster, Lee Lozano attended the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s and there met her future husband, Adrian Lozano. She went to New York and had some modest recognition, but spent much of her energy on marijuana and cheap booze. She was very troubled psychologically and the last twenty years of her life refused to speak to women.
At first her work was cartoonish and overtly sexual, but by the mid 60s became more abstract and formal. Some of her works were tool paintings, depicting screws, pipes and wrenches in sombre colors.
Source: ArtForum, October, 2001, Katy Siegel.
Lee Lozano, 68, Conceptual Artist Who Boycotted Women for Years
by Roberta Smith
Lee Lozano, an eccentric artist who pursued Conceptual Art and painting in the 1960's and then left the New York art world for self-imposed exile that included an embargo on contact with other woman, died on Oct. 2 in the Dallas Health and Rehabilitation Center in Texas. She was 68 and lived in Dallas.
The cause was cervical cancer, said Mark Kramer, the artist's cousin.
Ms. Lozano was a quixotic, confounding rebel whose decade long New York career seemed always to involve pushing one limit or another. Her early paintings, executed in an Expressionistic cartoon style, confronted issues of sexual and painterly decorum. They featured a robust messiness, distorted close-ups of the body, intimations of violence and suggestively exaggerated images of tools.
By 1967 she had taken the systemic approach of Minimalism, making nearly monochromatic "Wave" paintings based on wavelengths that pushed the limits of visual perception. In the mid-1960's she also began to execute a series of life-related actions (she didn't like the word performance) that tested, among other things her stamina, her friend's patience and the conduct of everyday life. These works reflected her friendship with Conceptually inclined artists like Sol Le Witt, Hollis Frampton, Dan Graham and Carl Andre. They also reflected an increasing disenchantment with the art world that bordered on hostility.
Many of these pieces were proposed or recorded in written works that she considered drawings. Sometimes she designated everyday activities like thought, conversation or marijuana smaking as art, attracted by the idea that they were unsaleable and democratic. Her "Throw-Up Piece" proposed throwing the 10 most recent issues of Artforum, the leading magazine of contemporary art, in the air and letting them fall where they may. In "Transistor Radio Piece" she listened to a radio while attending a panel discussion on art.
In 1969 and 1970 Ms. Lozano began a steady withdrawal from the art world in works that she titled "General Strike Piece" and "Dropout Piece." She decided to boycott women for a month or two as a means of improving communication with them. For unexplained reasons, she continued this piece to the end of her life, despite the great inconvenience and, one supposes even greater rudeness.
Ms. Lozano was born Lee Knaster in Newark in 1930. She received a B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1951 and studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. A brief marriage in the late 1950's to an architect, Adrian Lozano, ended in divorce. She leaves no survivors.
Ms. Lozano had her first exhibition at the Bianchini Gallery in New York in 1966 and was then associated with the Green Gallery. In 1998 her work, Long absent from the New York scene, returned when three SoHo galleries, Mitchell Algus, Rosen &Van Liere and Margarete Roeder, each showed a different phase of her painting. At the same time the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford exhibited her "Wave" paintings and notebooks. All the dealers and curators involved with these exhibitions were men.
Source: The New York Times on the web
- Dimensions: 11 3/4"H x 17 3/4"W, 19"H x 25"W (frame)
- Medium: graphite and crayon paper
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