calendario eventi  :: 

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13/5/2015

Two Exhibitions

Hauser & Wirth Chelsea, New York

Lee Lozano: Drawings & Paintings

Beginning 14 May, 2015, Hauser & Wirth is proud to present ‘Lee Lozano. Drawings & Paintings’, an exhibition that brings together a group of works from years of 1964 and 1965, a critical time of development for the artist.

Lozano’s art, produced over the course of little more than a decade, is striking for its breadth and energy, and admired for its daring physicality and tirelessness in investigating the body and issues of gender. In short, Lozano’s oeuvre comprises a search for a truly authentic form of expression. Standing apart from the detached and rarified conceptual art in her time, Lozano merged art and life, images and ideas together, in works characterized by a unique use of paint, language, and action. ‘Lee Lozano. Drawings & Paintings’ will remain on view at Hauser & Wirth’s 18th street location through 31 July 2015.

Central to the exhibition are five-large scale paintings, each titled after a verb – ‘Pitch’, ‘Slide’, ‘Lean’, ‘Swap’, and ‘Cram’. Rendered in dark, smoky tones and lustrous metallic colors, these nearly abstracted canvases are visual distillations of force. Insistently physical, paint is felt as solid matter and concentrated energy. They emerged from Lozano’s renowned Tool Paintings of the early 60s, which depict screwdrivers, bolts, wrenches, clamps, and hammers so anthropomorphized that they appear to be objects in sexualized motion. However, in the canvases on view at Hauser & Wirth, the provocative and aggressive emotional intensity has shifted away from figuration and derives instead from the extraordinary way in which Lozano worked.

In the verb paintings, the hard edges of the Lozano’s tools have morphed into optically complex geometric forms; their punning, overtly sexual connotations are concentrated here into a profound investigation of matter. Using three-inch housepainters’ brushes to create a finely ridged, slightly reflective surface, Lozano conveys the shape and directional thrust of her forms and suggests a full-bodied physicality. ‘It’s not just surface roundness that turns me on’, she wrote in 1968, ‘it’s the feeling of density, mass and weight’. In such works as ‘Slide’ (1965) and ‘Lean’ (1965), Lozano has literally clamped her canvases together, compounding their physicality along the straight, sharp geometric lines where form and color converge. Employing oil paint for its rich, tactile, and sensual qualities, Lozano achieves thick monochromatic fields of color, rendering images that teeter between three-dimensional spatiality and the planar two-dimensional surface. The verb paintings balance illusionist impressions with sharp points, angles, and spiraling cone-shaped forms.

It is noteworthy that Lozano’s verb paintings predated and anticipated Richard Serra’s inventory of actions titled ‘Verb List Complication: Actions to Relate to Oneself’ (1967 – 1968). In her notebooks, Lozano compiled a list of the titles of the paintings that she had produced between 1964 and 1967. Underlining the heading of the list, which appears in block capital letters, she explicitly indicated that her paintings were ‘ALL VERBS’. That list comprises twenty-nine titles and conveys the pleasure Lozano took from allowing objects to engage with double-edged meanings – tensions between the erotic and the violent, the mechanical and the organic.

Also on view at Hauser & Wirth will be a group of drawings in graphite on paper. These small preparatory drawings reflect the artist’s formal training. Meticulously prepared and calculating in her precision, Lozano pushed her ideas and studies for canvases to extremes. On lab book pages, beside the studies, she would work out mathematical proportions, reworking and examining every angle, literally making note that ‘angle CAB = angle EDG’. In a sort of physical endurance contest, Lozano labors over the act of creating art, exerting an energy and coercive charge that manifests and infuses her abstract forms with a sense of palpable three-dimensionality.

About the Artist
Lee Lozano left New York in 1972, staging her own exit and disengaging herself from the art world completely. She eventually settled in Dallas, Texas where she lived until her death in 1999. Her short lived but influential career remains a source of fascination, lauded by Lucy Lippard as the foremost female conceptual artist of her era in New York.

Since 1998, Lozano’s work has been subject to an intensive re-evaluation. Major exhibitions include: ‘Lee Lozano. MATRIX: 135’, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford CT (1998); ‘Lee Lozano. Drawn from Life: 1961 – 1971’, MoMA PS1, New York NY (2004); ‘Win First Don’t Last/Win Last Don’t Care’, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2006), travelled to Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands (2006); ‘“SEEK THE EXTREMES…” Lee Lozano’, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2006); ‘Lee Lozano. Retrospective’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2010). Lozano’s work was presented at documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany in 2007.

In her lifetime, Lee Lozano’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York NY (1970) and was shown at Green Gallery in New York NY (1964,1965).

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Ida Applebroog: The Ethics of Desire

A self-proclaimed ‘image scavenger’, Ida Applebroog has spent the past five decades conducting a sustained enquiry into the polemics of human relations. She explores themes of violence and power, gender politics, women’s sexuality, and domestic space using images stylistically reminiscent of comics, at once beguiling and disturbing. Appropriating mainstream media in innovative and surprising ways, this pioneering artist of the feminist movement and avatar of its enduring legacy transforms her canvases into the structural elements of an uncanny theater where visitors are both audience and actors.

Beginning 14 May 2015, Hauser & Wirth will present ‘Ida Applebroog. The Ethics of Desire’ at the gallery’s 18th Street location in New York City. The exhibition presents the artist’s latest paintings, as well as a film from 1978. The show will remain on view through 31 July.

Applebroog first came to attention in New York in the mid-1970s, returning to her hometown after spending years in Chicago, where she studied at the Art Institute, and then in California, where she taught at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Applebroog began her art practice with a series of small self-published books, ‘stagings’ of identical cartoon-like images presented in succession, evocative of flipbooks or film stills, which she mailed to other artists, writers, and individuals whose work she admired. From this beginning, Applebroog developed an instantly recognizable style of simplified human forms with bold outlines. In many ways, her early works directly referenced the window or theatre stage as a pictorial structure – a conceit Applebroog has continued to employ across her long career. This framing device, along with her tendency to propel painting and drawing into the realm of installation via arranging, stacking, and suspending canvases in space, draws viewers into enigmatic scenarios. In an Applebroog exhibition, the visitor becomes an observer and a participant in a domestic drama where fragmented narrative scenes are neither beginnings nor ends to the story.

At Hauser & Wirth, the exhibition title ‘The Ethics of Desire’ is a reference to Plato’s philosophical and ethical exploration of the many questions raised by our desires and the ways in which they shape our lives. Entering the gallery, the viewer is confronted by two multi-paneled works from Applebroog’s latest series, The Ethics of Desire. One is a six-panel work depicting nine women marching in a line, identically dressed in thigh-high boots and silvery hats but otherwise completely nude. The image calls to mind illustrations of can-can dancers with legs kicked high into the air; but without the expected sensual and bohemian trappings of the can-can genre, Applebroog’s dancers appear rigid and programmed. In stark juxtaposition, the second multi-panel work at the beginning of the exhibition is a triptych portraying three naked women seated and crouched, their sex unabashedly exposed.

In the gallery’s central space, Applebroog’s figures have grown into larger-than-life sized women and men hovering just over nine feet tall. Rendered in deep, saturated inks that the artist has manipulated by hand, these digitally-based figures are printed and painted on thin, translucent, ethereal mylar. Inspired by the flood of commercial imagery that sells to us every day, these paintings evoke the dramatic aesthetics of the catwalk. Applebroog’s ideal subjects strut and pose. A woman wears strappy high-heels; a man wears a brimmed cowboy hat. Suspended from the ceiling and dramatically lit, these bodies stand naked, situated in charged moments of socio-psychological tension. But Applebroog is not simply depicting idealized beauty. Her subjects are shown handcuffed from behind or injured, sporting casts, crutches, and even prosthetic limbs. For Plato, analyzing desire was a way to reflect upon the kind of people that we become as we give in to or resist the things that beckon to us. Here, Applebroog presents her ‘models’ in ways that reflect the desires of contemporary existence but ask us to reflect in turn upon the virtues and values of a the society that creates them.

Also on view in ‘The Ethics of Desire’ is a group of painted folding chairs upon which the artist has drawn fragmented scenes depicting snippets of domestic life. These works are positioned in relation to Applebroog’s suspended figures and suggest an invisible audience of spectators who are present but devoid of flesh and blood.

The exhibition continues with ‘It’s No Use Alberto’ (1978), Applebroog’s early experiment with film that was first shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1978. Like her first books, this work translates the artist’s unique illustration-based figuration into cinema. Applebroog’s actors here are a man and a woman – flat, two-dimensional puppets who appear to have risen from the printed page. In one scene, we find a headless man on his knees and a woman standing before him. Applebroog has explained, ‘… by the time you arrive on the scene – the story is over – what’s left is the situation which is being recalled’. Also exhibited here for the first time are the shadow puppets Applebroog used to create the film. By pairing enigmatic titles with similarly ambiguous scenes, ‘It’s No Use Alberto’ offers up situations of heightened drama and even emotional shock in a narrative about the relationships between men and women.

About the Artist

Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1929, Ida Applebroog lives and works in the Soho district of Manhattan. She is the recipient of many awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Art Association. Applebroog’s work has been shown in many solo exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States and internationally, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (1998); The Brooklyn Museum, New York NY (1994,1983); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston TX (1990); High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA (1989); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (1978), among others. In 2012, Applebroog presented in a large installation at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany – her second appearance at the celebrated international exhibition, having participated in documenta 8 in 1987.

Applebroog’s work resides in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York NY.

Image: Ida Applebroog, The Ethics of Desire, 2014, Oil and ultrachrome ink on mylar

Press Contact:
Andrea Schwan, Andrea Schwan Inc.
info@andreaschwan.com
+1 917 371 5023

Opening: Thursday 14 May 2015, 6 – 8 pm

Hauser & Wirth | Chelsea
511 West 18th Street
New York
Tue - Sat 10am to 6pm

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