![]() ![]() Courtesy: Hauser & Wirth photograph: Barbora Gerny. Lee Lozano, No title, 1967, graphite on paper, 28 × 21.5 cm. Though she was conflicted about her decision to begin the action, she carried it on until the end of her life (she died in 1999). But this action was more subtle than one might imagine: for the artist, it didn’t represent a wholesale desertion of her gender but rather a rejection of the balkanized and gendered organizing of the Art Workers’ Coalition, a group of artists promoting change in cultural institutions. ![]() Lozano is perhaps best known for severe conceptual actions such as Decide to Boycott Women (1971), in which she ceased interacting with female peers. Lee Lozano, No title, 1967, pen on paper (facsimile), 27.9 × 21.6 cm. And, fittingly, while his list closes with ‘to continue’, hers ends with ‘STOP’. Lozano’s list not only predates Serra’s it is succinct where his is verbose, cheeky where his is leaden. As Jo Applin deftly points out in her monograph Lee Lozano: Not Working (2018), this piece surpasses Richard Serra’s more famous Verb List (1967). Lozano’s conceptual work No title (1967) lists the verbs she used for titles between 1964 and ’67, including Butt and Cram. Lee Lozano, No title, 1968, pen and graphite on paper, 28 × 22.2 cm. It’s part dopey slapstick, part cunning manipulation of the support, prefiguring works such as Steven Parrino’s 13 Shattered Panels (for Joey Ramone) (2001). Lozano notes below the sketch: ‘This painting should be hung crooked’, as though one painted ball weighs down its canvas, tilting the piece off-kilter. An untitled 1968 study for a proposed series titled ‘Pot-Baller’ depicts a diptych of two orbs: one sits at the centre of the left-hand canvas, the other on the bottom corner of the right-hand canvas. Others are sketches for unrealized pieces. Some of these preparatory pieces – an untitled 1964–65 drawing that resembles Spin, for instance – are more interesting than the finished works, having more verve and urgency in their composition and scribbly execution. ‘ALL VERBS’ includes compositional sketches and personal notes, as well as studies for and variations on the ‘verb’ paintings. ![]() Lozano’s works on paper are some of the most understatedly electrifying of her oeuvre. ‘Lee Lozano: ALL VERBS’ at Hauser & Wirth highlights the quiet, easily overlooked actions of refusing, thinking and planning. As with ‘butt’ and 'cram', ‘strike’, too, is a verb, an act of forceful conceptual refusal. Three years later, in 1969, she would begin to perform General Strike Piece, a work of unknown duration that consisted of her refusing to participate in the social and institutional art world. These canvases comprised Lozano’s first solo exhibition at New York’s Bianchini Gallery in 1966. Each depicts one or more geometric forms, such as cones or shafts, stretching or splaying across canvases, contrasting tints running over the images in rays. It is one of a meditative group of five paintings, all with verbs as titles: Butt (1966), Cram (1965), Spin (1964), and Swap (1966). In Lee Lozano’s Lean (1966), coarse brushwork pulls repeatedly through thick oil paint, colour welling in raised, corduroy-like rows.
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