Lee Lozano

The career of American artist Lee Lozano (1930-1999) was brief but extraordinarily intense. Throughout the 1960s, during the transition from Pop art to Minimalism and Conceptualism, and up until her self-imposed exile in the 1970s, Lozano created a genuinely radical and frequently obscene body of work that traversed a gamut of idioms. Her early paintings were executed in a messy cartoon style, oozing with violence and sexuality. By 1967, Lozano was responding to Minimalism and Op art with her abstract Wave paintings. It was also around this time that she initiated a series of actions that tested both the limits of art and acceptable conduct in society, such as smoking pot, masturbating and, mostly notoriously of all, boycotting women. This publication accompanies a retrospective of Lozano's works at Moderna Museet in Stockholm--works which after 40 years remain as witty, acerbic and shockingly fresh as ever.