Material Actions

Lee Lozano’s paintings are admired for their energy, daring physicality and tirelessness in investigating the body and issues of gender. Although lauded by Lucy Lippard in 1995 as the foremost female conceptual artist of her time, Lozano had disengaged herself from the New York art world completely by the early 1970s. She left behind a body of work of striking formal breadth and complexity. Lozano fought to consolidate her artistic self in a realm void of systems, rules, and group consciousness. She pursued a wholly independent solo studio practice, which culminated in her rejection of the New York art world and a boycott of women. She first refused to attend public art world functions and withdrew from exhibitions, finally relocating to Dallas, Texas. ‘By refusing to speak to women,’ says Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator of LA MOCA, ‘she exposed the systematic and ruthless division of the world into categories of men and women. By refusing to speak to women as an artwork, she also refused the demand of capitalism for the constant production of private property… The strategy of rejection is a powerful one.’

Born in Carinthia in Southern Austria in 1919, Maria Lassnig’s (1919 – 2014) work is based on the observation of the physical presence of the body and what she termed ‘body awareness’, or ‘Körpergefühl’ in German. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in the midst of the Second World War. Then, in post-war Europe, she quickly moved away from the state-approved academic realism in which she was trained, looking to Austria’s own avant-garde past, such as the coloration of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele’s expressionist treatment of figuration.

Her early years were marked by experiences with various ‘isms’, including artistic currents in surrealism and automatism from the late 1940s, followed by ‘art informel’ and post-cubism in the 1950s. After moving to Paris in 1960, an innovative figuration, expressive and painterly, was beginning to emerge. In the next few years, she developed narrative paintings with one or more figures, at times borrowing from technoid forms of science fiction set in absurdly caricatured scenes. Animal-like, monstrous self-portraits emerged alongside this group of works.

In 1968, Lassnig moved to New York where her artistic work once again switched direction—she turned to external realism and painted portraits, nudes and still lifes, at times combining these with her ‘body awareness’ self-portraits. Many of her paintings, drawings and watercolors were devoted to recording her physiological states through a direct and unflinching style. Utilizing contrasting colors such as greens, pinks and blues, as well as strong body shapes to give her paintings a powerful, even drastic impact, Lassnig looked to herself, a female artist in a predominantly male world, as her primary subject.

Of her artistic process, Lassnig has said: ‘I step in front of the canvas naked, as it were. I have no set purpose, plan, model or photography. I let things happen. But I do have a starting-point, which has come from my realization that the only true reality are my feelings, played out within the confines of my body. They are physiological sensations: a feeling of pressure when I sit or lie down, feelings of tension and senses of spatial extent. These things are quite hard to depict.’ Her famed portraits and self-portraits are often treated with a playful irony, even in her depictions of the aging body and psychological turmoil.

In 1980, Lassnig was awarded a professorship—with a focus on painting and animation film—at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. As a result, her self-portraits repeatedly explored issues of overload and enforced estrangement. She then began dealing more extensively with mythological contents, with nature and ‘rural life,’ and continued her exploration of figure-ground tensions. From the late 1990s, Lassnig turned to the great existential themes with her so-called Drastic Pictures, such as the relationship between the sexes and generations, unchosen lifestyles, as well as oppression, destruction, impermanence, and death.

Portrait: Maria Lassnig in her studio, Vienna, 2007 © Monopol/Elfie Semotan 2007

Anna Maria Maiolino is one of the most significant artists working in Brazil today. Born 1942 in Italy, Maiolino’s practice expresses a concern with creative and destructive processes. Working across a wide range of disciplines and mediums—spanning drawing, printmaking, poetry, film, performance, installation and sculpture—Maiolino relentlessly explores notions of subjectivity and self.

Through fragmentation and abstraction, Maiolino’s surfaces are rich with metaphor, alluding to and questioning language, sexuality, desire and the unconscious. The artist’s deeply formative migration from post-war Southern Italy to a politically unstable South America, and her linguistic passage from Italian to Portuguese, engendered an enduring fascination with identity. Maiolino has perfected a dialogue between opposite yet complementary categories in a practice that dissolves dichotomies of inner and outer, self and other. Hers is an art in search of a new language for the liminal realm of daily human existence.

Shadowed by the turmoil and governance of military repression, Maiolino’s early experiments in the 1960s connected her to important movements in Brazilian art history such as New Figuration and New Objectivity. Maiolino took part in the radical reconfiguring of the art object—and thus the art institution and the artist—during this period. Along with Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, and Hélio Oiticica, Maiolino participated in the 1967 exhibition, ‘New Brazilian Objectivity,’ which symbolized a cultural shift in previous constructivist traditions and established a new vision for the production of art in Brazil.

Since the early 1980s Maiolino has worked with malleable materials that, through her handling, come to bear the imprint of unconscious gestures, daily rituals and sensory expressions of being. Her mark-making is based on the repetition of basic actions that are recorded in the material; her forms the result of this laborious processing of raw material, like the basic bodily functions of eating and defecating. Hers is a work of liberation: abstraction is freed from the more repressed and puritanical precepts of Minimalism and brought back into the service of the active, desiring body.

Influenced by 1960s counterculture, the free speech movement, and the surf ethos of her native California, Mary Heilmann ranks amongst the most influential abstract painters of her generation. Considered one of the preeminent contemporary Abstract painters, Heilmann’s practice overlays the analytical geometries of Minimalism with the spontaneous ethos of the Beat Generation, and are always distinguishable by their often unorthodox—always joyful—approach to color and form.

Raised in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Heilmann completed a degree in literature, before she studied ceramics at Berkeley. Only after moving to New York in 1968 did she begin to paint. While most artists at that time were experimenting with the concept of dematerialization and demanding that painting should avoid any references to experience outside the material presence of the work itself, Heilmann opted for painting, rebelling against the accepted rules. ‘Rather than following the decrees of modern, non-representational formalism, I started to understand that the essential decisions taken during the creative process were more and more related to content. The Modern movement was over…’

Since then, Heilmann has created compositions that evoke a variety of associations. Her work may be non-representational and based on an elementary, geometrical vocabulary—circles, squares, grids and stripes—but there is always something slightly eccentric, casual about them. The simplicity of the forms is played down by a deceptive form of nonchalance: the contours are not clearly defined. In some paintings, amorphous forms appear to melt into each other like liquid wax. Splashes of color can be discerned, sharp edges bleed for no apparent reason, and the ductus of the brushstrokes is always perceptible. Heilmann’s casual painting technique conceals a frequently complex structure that only gradually reveals itself to the viewer.