Lee Lozano
The Ultimate Metaphor is a Mirror
The Ultimate Metaphor is a Mirror is the first exhibition in Denmark with the American artist Lee Lozano (1930-1999). In the 1960s she created an extremely boundary-challenging oeuvre which surprises us to this day. As a particularly active figure on the experimental art scene in New York she contributed to the development of the many new parallel art directions, such as pop art, minimalism and especially conceptual art. The exhibition presents a major selection of Lozano’s early works from the years 1959-1964 and thus outlines the contours of a unique oeuvre.
»It is crazy, how these drawings that are nearly 60 years old have such a fantastic kapow-effect, that hits you right between the eyes«
Weekendavisen
»… a unique opportunity to get to know a distinctive and extreme artist on Danish soil, who quite rightly has received growing international attention in recent years.«
Information
In 1960, when Lee Lozano went to New York, it was a time of upheavals in the city, which was a rallying point for artists who like Lozano wanted changes. With grotesque sarcastic and subversive means she commented critically in her early works on the unequal, male-dominated society and its stereotyped views of gender, which were echoed everywhere – for example in advertising, in architecture and in the organization of the art scene. However, Lozano never became part of the new feminist movement of the time, with which she declared she did not identify.
With more than a hundred drawings and paintings distributed over six sections the exhibition covers a particularly productive period when Lee Lozano frequently changed her stylistic expression and groups of subjects. Several of the works contain text elements, often in the form of slogans or sarcastic comments that demonstrate Lozano’s alertness to language. A recurring motif is the body – often in fragmented form or incarnated by machines, machine parts or tools. Each section is also accompanied by a quote from Lee Lozano’s Private Books, which she began to write in 1968 as a kind of notebooks and diaries.
At the end of the 1960s Lee Lozano gave up the traditional media in favour of her radical new format, ”Language Pieces”, which she began in 1968. They have the character of written instructions for or registrations of actions intended to take place in real life. They are the closest Lozano comes to her declared aim of merging art and life. In 1972, perhaps as predicted in the work ”Dropout Piece”, she broke off all contact with the established art institutions and later moved out of New York. In 1981 she moved to Dallas, where lived until she died in 1999.
The film Manual of Arms (1966) by Hollis Frampton is shown in GL STRAND’s cinema during the whole exhibition period. Frampton, is one of the first people Lee Lozano meets after moving to New York in 1960. Together with friends she participates in this early short film. This ’14 drills for the camera’ experiment is a formalist portrait film including 13 artists and one historian, all of whom are either Frampton’s lover or close friends. According to Frampton, the film has “the look of a New York loft, a certain overlay of gritty, claustrophobic funk that permeated that whole period.”
