No title

In the early 1960s, Lee Lozano inserted herself into the New York art scene, frequenting the major figures of male conceptual art. Her radicalism, total independence, and disdain of other women artists (with whom she nevertheless shared certain artistic affinities) kept her at a distance from the emerging feminist movements of that era. She accused them of relegating women to the subjugated position of victims. In her own way, Lozano rejected the assignment of identities and patriarchal domination through works in which depicted bodies and sexes in an uncompromising manner.

At once gritty and threatening, her canvasses reverberate with the frenetic treatment of a particularly dense materiality of paint. The artist reworked the paint surface until it became almost sculptural. The anonymous figure with grotesque orifices in the small, tightly framed piece No title (1962) is the same as in the other No title (ca.1962), shown frontally with a ravenous smile. The phallic nature of the protruding nose is all the more evident here for contrasting against the breast depicted above and to the left, visually removed from the rest of the pictorial space by a line that acts like a wall separating the space assigned to each gender. Lozano portrayed the male organ for the notion of power and dominance that it evokes, as a central element around which patriarchal society is structured, and within which women are marginalised

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.