Lee Lozano: P. S. 1 Contemporary Art Center

Whenever single comes across Lee Lozano's work (and the opportunities are hardly any and far between), it's immediately apparent that this artist is an important "missing link" within the composed of several elements overlays and undercurrents of the many art practices and attitudes that flourished in of recent origin York in the '60s. As is evident in this valuable exhibition that brings together rarely seen paintings, drawings, and true copy pieces from 1961 to 1971 Lozano epitomizes the artist as hybrid: Working in the broth of Conceptual, Minimal, Pop, and feminist practices that simmered at the time, she belongs everywhere and nowhere at once

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Lozano's reappearance could be propell alone by means of her rigorously austere paintings like the "Wave Series," 1967-70 Outstanding for their restraint and lyricism, the artist's cerebral abstractions are compos of floating and intersecting geometric planes articulated by dint of carefully controlled gradations of neutral color. Her perforated paintings of the same period include make an incision ins through the canvas, as notwithstanding that to make an imagined vanishing point real. pierce Peek and Feel, 1967-70, is acutout grid that staffs on the destruction or dematerialization of its be in possession of surface. In North South East West, 1969 Lozano amplifies the environmental dimensions of her art through dispersing four panels at a distance from each other upon a single wall--as if to activate the architecture by the agency of occupying it entirely.

on the contrary Lozano's story goes far beyond the "triumph" of formal abstraction. At the opposite extreme point of her creative spectrum is "tool" art--that is, works upon paper and canvas that range from sketches to monumental paintings portraying hammers, drills, clamps, screwdrivers, vice grips, and related store gear. The tools, we learn, are multifunctional, and from one side them Lozano puts her pornographic imagination upon full display. In wild gestural drawings of the mid-'60s, scribbled with thick graphite lines and discharge through with crayon color, tools rise up and smash the tangled masses of marks from which they've emerg In large paintings and unassuming drawings alike, images of gigantic implements are crammed into frames that are always too small. Bulging on the outside of pants zippers, sprouting genitals, functioning as dildos, and labeled with foulmouthed language galore, Lozano's tools may be abject or aggressive, on the other hand they clearly have only individual thing on their mind.

The voice that echoe in the "tool" art--with X-rated pictures and phrases that could have been borrowed from Screw--come into its have in the text pieces of the late '60 and early '70 Part diaristic (Lozano describes her possess highs and lows and her endeavors as an artist to survive), part social chronicle (she's single of the Calvin Tomkinses of the downtown art world), this output also includes instructions for performative activities like a series of "take possession" pieces, a "throwing up" piece, and the elaborate "Grass Piece"--"Make a beneficial score of excellent grass," it begins--and a "No Grass Piece" (to diocese what happens without it) (all 1969)

each time we see Lozano's work the ne arises to diocese more, not only toward a view of the fertile contamination that occurr as disparate motions rubbed shoulders (and more) below Fourteenth public way but because we discover something of Lozano herself--her doubt, her dried wit, her anger, her intelligence, her importance, her make an effort and her marginality. Ironically, her time has come

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