Tranlation - For Harper’s Bazaar – 07/11/2023 – Link

 

The Lee Lozano Enigma 

 

Lee Lozano’s groundbreaking work is now shaking the grounds of the Pinault Foundation, in Paris, presenting the artist and her trailblazing career for the first time in France 

 

France had to wait until 2023, for E to finally shine and resonate. E, a letter that artist Lee Lozano adopted as a name. E, a letter found in Entity, Energy, Experience, Echoes. Lee Lozano is also an Enigma. Her artistic career was short, intense, and remains indelible. Born Lenore Knaster, Lee Lozano grew up in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1930s, when America was stalling and Europe was bursting into ideological warfare. In 1944, Knaster was 14 and decided to baptize herself Lee. After studying Sciences and Philosophy, the young woman met Adrian Lozano, a Mexican architect and designer. The couple married, studied, traveled, and eventually divorced after a four-year union. Lee became Lee Lozano, a composite of her artistic identity and her womanhood.

 

From 1960, Lee Lozano embarked on a decade of intense artistic production. The artist asserted herself at a moment where America had been reanimated by Warhol and Oldenburg: popular culture had triumphed and the commercial motifs of daily lives were absorbed to satisfy the endless thirst of consumption. Foregrounding the irony and hypocrisy of her time, her work is at once cynical and potent. Abstract yet vividly descriptive, Lozano’s production speaks, screams, and shocks. Strike, exhibited at la Bourse de Commerce in Paris, finally reveals her demented brilliance to the French audience. The exhibition retraces Lee Lozano’s fusion into art, her evolution is presented through a curation of her drawings, paintings, and notebooks—each piece initiating an eternal dialogue with Lozano’s anima.

 

The exhibition opens on the artist’s drawings and captures the eye of the visitor with a sense of guilt and voyeurism. This is not accidental: between cut-out phalluses or breasts, morality confronts reason. Lee Lozano’s drawings are figurative, harsh and somewhat humorous. They align with Crumb’s quirky comics, yet the infusion of a feminine perspective marks them as distinctly original. Thick lines of charcoal and colored pencils deliberately trigger the mind. We are confronted with what the artist rejects : society. Lee Lozano challenges the ideological pillars of gender, bureaucracy, and systems. Her drawings interrogate and howl the contemptuous agonies of sex, power, and money. Faced with the impossibility of finding clear answers, solutions, or escapes ; what remains is laughter. Visitors penetrate her discourse and find themselves chuckling, alone, standing in front of a couple of frames. In the end, nothing is solemn or literal, nothing is real - only the present emotion remains and matters; Lee Lozano understood it well. She guides the viewer and takes them by the hand or rather by the eyes, to partake in her feverish passions, aversions, and her repulsions. She figures in a first wave of feminism, battling her own sexuality and challenging the adopted ideas of gender.  In her vision of the world, women prevail, men languish, war is a vulgar pastime that fattens economies and fosters stupidity, while Judaism shines as a beacon of equity and a resource of wisdom. 

 

Lozano deepens her figurative vision of the body and the American mind through her series Tools. Close-up plans of hammers, nails, and vises unfold on giant canvases, asserting their presence as independent entities both endowed with the potential to create and annihilate beyond the linen fibers they animate. These instruments mirror the modern spirit, the one that Chaplin depicted in Modern Times. They screw the viewer, penetrate and question their very own sights. Lozano’s Tools shake the grounds of identity and illustrate America’s rapid jump from the ideal to the real. Their sexual dimension exhumes the sharp physical, social and psychological reality of the 1960s. They also depict the triumph of superficiality. The triumph of the body over the mind. Lozano’s paintings are still screaming at society today. A society that praises surgical operations as tokens of grandeur, a society where sport has become more relevant than books. These Tools represent what Yourcenar predicted in her 1929 European Diagnostic, they show the poor hypocrisies of the world. This introspective nature cements Lee Lozano’s work amongst contemporary art, which is inherently provocative, unsettling, and enigmatic. It shocks and still screams. Lozano's masterstrokes lie in the resonance of her work across time—it spoke volumes in her own era and continues to resonate in ours.

 

In an attempt to make peace with the world or offer a glimpse of hope that believes in the triumph of mind over matter, the exhibition establishes a third and final act that presents pieces of Lozano’s Wave series. Produced at the end of the 1960s, these Waves steer towards minimalism. Only light, color, and curve remain. One is bathed in light halos that envelop walls, high perched or standing upright, they converse in silence with people wandering around the room. Lee Lozano’s sensitivity and finesse is extracted and finally highlighted. The chromatic curves are simple and strong.  They present Lozano’s remarkable talent as a colorist. A subtle play between shadow and light illuminates the canvas and seems to transcend space, like fire or emotions. These waves clash and communicate, they mirror the artist’s thoughts, her own echoes - echoes that reach the six senses until one can almost feel a soothing energy. They embody the residual essence of a mental apocalypse, their serene insensibility offer a glimpse into a potential answer to today's widespread collapse of reason. It's as if Lozano anticipated what was to come, choosing to show the world a preview of its impending fate.

 

In 1969, Lee Lozano decisively cut her ties with the art establishment and its commercial trappings, embodying her 'General Strike Piece', much like Charlotte Posenenske and Cady Noland along with other contemporary artists such as Maurizio Cattelan and Tino Seghal. Whilst she crafted her work for 10 years with prophetic insight, Lozano recognized the stagnation of her era and chose total retreat. This wasn't surrender but the next rational and calculated move of her artistic career. This is her last piece : ‘Drop Out’. Lozano transformed her exit from the art scene into a performance art piece. In stark contrast to Warhol's disciples, she embraced the life of a recluse. In the years that followed, she even resolved to disengage from all women as part of her new project, ‘Decide to Boycott Women’—a temporary act that persisted for the remainder of her life. This audacious performance, still deemed scandalous, highlights Lee Lozano's unwavering feminist stance. By refusing to engage with other women, she provocatively cast a spotlight on her gender, challenging the notion of "the weaker sex."

 

Lee Lozano became a living artwork, autonomous and self-evolving. Her notebooks are testaments, replete with sketches, ideas, encounters, bursting with vitality or the simple details of "To Do" lists—a window into the artist's private world. Withdrawing from women and the artistic sphere, Lozano sought solace in Dallas, in her parents' home. Her identity shifted like the phases of her work, perpetually redefining itself. Lee evolved into 'Lee free', 'Leefer,' - a nod to 'reefer' and 'leaf’ - and finally became ‘E’. Her appellations are labels reflecting her own transformations. Like a sculpture in constant refinement, she reshaped and remodeled herself. Lee Lozano faded away in Texas, and finally left her body, her corporeal limitations, to emerge as an entity. She departed as an enigma, remaining under an anonymous tombstone, in 1999. 

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