EDINBURGH.- The Fruitmarket Gallery is presenting an exhibition of the furiously inventive paintings, drawings and text works of American artist Lee Lozano (1930–1999).
The Spring exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery brings work by American artist Lee Lozano to Edinburgh. Lozano was a major figure in the New York art scene of the 1960s and early 1970s, but her radical approach to art and life, in particular her systematic refusal to engage with the institutions and support structures of the art world, led to her work being neglected and becoming much less well known over time. Recently, this has begun to change, and we are proud to make this first solo exhibition of her work in Scotland, bringing together paintings, drawings, language pieces and notes on making paintings that have only just come to light.
After studying first natural science and philosophy and then painting in Chicago, Lozano moved to New York in 1960 and swiftly became known for her expressive, suggestive, and often transgressive paintings and drawings. Over the decade, her practice developed and changed, and she made ever larger and progressively more abstracted paintings. She was a pioneer of conceptual art, and in the late 1960s began keeping notebooks full of ideas and notes-to-self.
‘I have started to document everything because I cannot give up my love of ideas’
These notes became artworks in their own right – language pieces in the form of instructions that she carried out then wrote up in works she thought of as drawings and first exhibited them in 1971 under the title Infofiction. In 1969 she began her General Strike Piece, in which she ceased participating in public art events; in 1971 she stopped talking to women; and in 1972 her Dropout Piece caused her to leave New York and withdraw entirely from the art world. She died in 1999 without returning to public life or making art in any form other than writings and telephone conversations. Her last work Questionnaire, with jokes, concerning purchases and purchasers of my art, was mailed to her gallerists in 1998.
This exhibition brings together work from across Lozano’s career. Tiny, furiously inventive paintings from 1962 are being shown alongside a selection of irreverent, metamorphic drawings from the same time. Four vast paintings – No title (1964), Cram, Clamp (both 1965) and Lean (1966) are contextualised both by related drawings and previously unseen notes and instructions. The Infofictions complete the exhibition, drawing visitors into the world of Lozano’s innovative and uncompromising artistic imagination; the world of a supremely talented painter who in the end prioritised thinking over doing.
'I’d just as soon live in a world of ideas; I find I’m more and more interested in mental energy as opposed to real matter’ --Lee Lozano, 16/7/71
Lee Lozano was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1930. She studied at University of Chicago IL, BA, 1951 then at the Art Institute of Chicago IL, BFA, graduating in 1960.
She died in Dallas Texas in 1999.
In her lifetime, Lee Lozano’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York NY (1970) and was shown at Green Gallery in New York NY (1964,1965) amongst others. She has been described by Lucy Lippard as ‘the major female figure in New York in the ’60s’ in terms of conceptual art. Lozano’s peers included Carl Andre, Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Sol Lewitt, Robert Morris and Richard Serra.
Major exhibitions include: ‘Lee Lozano. Pulling out the Stops’, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2017); ‘Lee Lozano c. 1962, Hauser & Wirth London (2017); Lee Lozano. Drawings & Paintings’, Hauser & Wirth New York, 18th Street (2015); ‘Lee Lozano. Retrospective’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2010); Hauser & Wirth Zürich (2008); ‘Lee Lozano. No Title. 1969’, Hauser & Wirth London (2007); ‘Dorothy Iannone und Lee Lozano’, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006); ‘Win First Don’t Last/Win Last Don’t Care’, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2006), which travelled to Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2006); ‘Lee Lozano. Drawn from Life: 1961 – 1971’, MoMA PS1, New York NY (2004); and ‘Lee Lozano. MATRIX: 135’, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford CT (1998). Her work was also presented at documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany in 2007. This exhibition is brought together with the help of The Estate of Lee Lozano and Hauser & Wirth.
The Fruitmarket Gallery programmes exhibitions with the best Scottish and International artists and enriches these with a wide variety of cultural and educational events. We are committed to making contemporary art accessible without under-estimating audiences or compromising art or the ideas it enacts. We create a welcoming space for people to think with art in ways that are meaningful to them – for free.
