VIENNA, AUSTRIA.- Dorothy Iannone (*1933) and Lee Lozano (1930-1999), two U.S. artists from the same generation, American advocates of a radical art in which drawing, painting, and text are equal, integral components. Both artists were radical in their expression of sexual content, although their styles of expression are nearly diametrically opposed.

Iannone sang a song of ecstasy, Lozano of a polymorphously perverse universe of obsessive-excessive lust and its dark side, revulsion. Both embody a radical individualism that searched for artistic solutions beyond the mainstream.

Today, their pioneering role for contemporary artists is clearly evident. Iannone’s work is dominated by a horror vacui resulting in an abundance of figures, ornamental motifs, and picture stories exploding in a rush of color, whereas Lee Lozano’s early work (1960-65) surprises us with its unbridled, humorously biting eruptions. Iannone’s major theme is ecstatic love, inspired by her long-term alliance with the artist Dieter Roth - the love of her life. In the 1960s her art was censored for supposedly pornographic content, while Lee Lozano’s equally provocative studies of orgasmic-sexual self-display passed below the radar of the self-appointed guardians of public morals. Lozano eventually became known with her later, conceptual-abstract works, in which she held up a mirror to the art market, distorting its vanity and machinations to the point of recognizability.
With both, there is a connection to comics - for Lozano in the mentioned obscene puns, that acted as redundant captions and titles or as “speech balloons” of the depicted “protagonists”; for Iannone in the form of filmic, progressive picture stories structured from various narrative perspectives.

The exhibition focuses on the work of two women who resisted all attempts at appropriation - of the canon of art history and even by feminist theory. Both artists, each using her own means, developed an aesthetic of vehement and orgiastic self-exposure, which occasionally offended their contemporaries. With no sense of inhibition, Iannone shows an animated, individualized, erotic driving force, whereas Lozano’s works are inhabited by soulless beings, only comprised of sexual organs, consumed by the blazing heat of their sexual fury. The uncompromising nature of both artists marginalized them in art history and in later years led to radically different lives: Today, Iannone still works in Berlin, materializing the messages of her spiritual/libidinal devotion, whereas Lozano withdrew from the art scene in 1972 having decided to continue one of her conceptual pieces for the rest of her life: to boycott women and never speak to them again.

Both artists have resurfaced in the art world only in the past two years: Lozano with a tribute at PS 1, New York (2004) and concurrently, a retrospective at the Kunsthalle Basel; Iannone with a retrospective together with Dieter Roth at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover (2005), participation in the Berlin Biennale (2005/6), an appearance at the Tate Gallery (Wrong Gallery, 2005) and the Whitney Biennial this year. Kunsthalle Wien is presenting the works of these two artists for the first time in Vienna. Exhibited will be drawings, paintings, installations, video, and artist’s books. The exhibition was curated by Sabine Folie. Catalogue: accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue with texts by Sabine Folie, Hans-Jürgen Hafner, and Barbara Vinken published by the Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg. Edited by Kunsthalle Wien, Sabine Folie, Gerald Matt.