Films
On Site: Lee Lozano with Dr Jo Applin
Professor at The Courtauld Institute of Art, Jo Applin explores Lee Lozano’s energetic drawings and oil paintings from the 1960s.
Jo Applin gives an insight into both Lee Lozano’s life and her work, contextualizing her practice and highlighting her response to the constraints of constitutional systems, gender dynamics, power, money, and politics.
Created in 1962–1963, the early paintings and drawings on view at Hauser & Wirth Somerset use airplanes as a central image and can be considered as examples of the artist’s passionate exploration of creative energy in its purist form. This focused body of early work exposes a complex and deeply intimate inner life grappling with one-sided gender and societal dichotomies, while other works display a form of ferocious humour and playfulness, exploiting the rhetoric of exaggeration to its most cogent effect. Her raw expressionist brush strokes create powerful works imbued with a very personal iconography, including genitals, religious symbols, tools and body parts.
‘She’s beginning to depict something like a world at this time, she’s developing a language that’s all her own’—Jo Applin
Lee Lozano, No Title, 1962-1963 © The Estate of Lee Lozano
Lee Lozano, No Title, 1962-1963 © The Estate of Lee Lozano
Speaking on Lozano’s drawings and paintings from the 1960s, created during the time the artist spent in New York City, Jo Applin asserts, ‘she’s beginning to depict something like a world at this time, she’s developing a language that’s all her own.’ Lozano's short lived but influential career remains a source of fascination, lauded by Lucy Lippard as the foremost female conceptual artist of her era in New York. – ‘Lee Lozano’ is on view at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 3 October 2020 – 10 January 2021. Jo Applin is author of ‘Lee Lozano: Not Working’ and ‘Eccentric Objects: Rethinking Sculpture.’ She teaches modern and contemporary art at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London.