No title

Lee Lozano turned towards minimalist abstraction in the mid-1960s. She gave up small formats and her thick brush strokes to paint large, smooth canvasses whose geometric proportions she calculated meticulously. Lozano made these on the basis of many sketches and preliminary drawings, in the margins of which she wrote down her thoughts and intuitions about the compositions. She applied several layers of paint to the canvas, using just a household brush, until the bristles made fine grooves in the dried surface. From afar, these new forms retain the cold and metallic aspect of the tools she depicted; close up, the gradations and the interplay of the light reveal their concentration of energy.

The piece No title (1969) is one of the artist’s last works. It consists of four panels depicting circular segments, one of which has been perforated, and which, hung on the wall, together form a large circle around an empty centre. In the centre of this white circle, Lee Lozano saw the possibility of an opening onto infinity, an expansion in time and space that was as ungraspable as death. Positioned to face one another, the panels confront and complete one another, fully expressing this notion of “energetic painting” that mattered so much to the artist.

The work was shown for the first time at the Bourse de Commerce in Lee Lozano "Strike",  Pinault Collection, 20 September 202 – 22 January 2024.