Strike
March 8–July 23, 2023
Pinacoteca Agnelli presents Strike, an unprecedented solo exhibition dedicated to Lee Lozano (1930–99), a pioneering artist and key figure from the New York 1960s art scene. The exhibition, conceived and realised by Pinacoteca Agnelli, is open to the public until Sunday 23 July 2023 in the museum spaces in Turin. It will then be presented at the Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection in Paris from September 2023 to February 2024.
Curated by Sarah Cosulich and Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, Strike is the first monographic survey in Italy dedicated to Lee Lozano. The exhibition fits in with the institution’s renewed contemporary mission, which aims to bring to light unprecedented artistic practices in dialogue with the historical and symbolic legacy of the exhibition venue and its industrial past.
The exhibition brings together a broad selection of works by the artist, spanning her brief but extremely prolific career from 1960 to 1972. Trained as a painter, Lee Lozano moved to New York and swiftly rose to recognition in the city’s art scene of the 1960s. Despite being actively involved in the social and artistic context of the time—dominated by Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptualism—Lozano pursued her own radically eclectic style. Adopting an autobiographical and provocative approach, her work confronts the mechanisms of power with a firm rejection of any system and pre-established order. In just ten years, the evolution of her work moved from explicit expressionist drawings and figurative paintings to abstract minimalist canvases, ending with an exclusively conceptual practice culminating in her choice to abandon the art world altogether. Lee Lozano then vanished without trace. Little is known about her life in the years that followed, except that she changed her name several times, from Lee to Leefer, to Lee Free, to using only the letter E. She died in Dallas in 1999, where by her own choice she was buried in a grave with an unmarked gravestone.
Divided into seven thematic rooms, the retrospective explores various stages of her career. The first three rooms present figurative drawings and paintings in which vivid, sometimes grotesque depictions of the human body push the limits of traditional nude iconography, with a deliberately satirical stance. The core of the show is dedicated to Lozano’s Tools series, in which hammers, screwdrivers and other utensils become the anthropomorphic subjects of large-scale oils on canvas. In another room, her Airplanes series presents various flying objects interacting with human orifices and body parts. The exhibition concludes by tracing Lozano’s shift towards minimalist abstraction, with her monumental paintings accompanied by a rare selection of preparatory sketches. Lastly, the booklet accompanying the exhibition brings together a significant number of “Life-Art” Pieces, works that mark the transition to the conceptual phase of her practice, which ends with her definitive rejection of the art scene through Dropout Piece (1970).
For international press enquiries please contact:
Kitty Malton, kitty [at] sam-talbot.com, T +44 (0) 7514 803 577.
For Italian press enquiries please contact:
Francesca Ceriani, francesca [at] paolamanfredi.com, T +39 340 9182004.
