Collection: Lee Lozano

Lee Lozano (1930–1999) worked in New York from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, producing a body of work that moved from raw, confrontational drawings through large-scale Tool and Wave paintings to Language Pieces and, finally, a series of deliberate withdrawals from the art world.

Her early works on paper — made between 1959 and 1964 — are among the most charged objects in postwar American art: bodies, tools, erotic signs, social aggression, gender codes, humour and refusal compressed into pencil and ink on paper. These drawings preceded and in many ways anticipated the conceptual turn, but they resist easy categorisation. They are too physical for pure concept, too systematic for expressionism, too funny and too violent for either.

By the late 1960s, Lozano had shifted into language-based work: the General Strike Piece (1969), in which she withdrew from the art world; the Dropout Piece (1970), in which she stopped seeing women; and a sustained refusal of institutional participation that she maintained until her death. Her work re-entered wider circulation through major retrospectives and publications in the 2000s and 2010s.

Items here include exhibition posters, printed matter, and ephemera connected to Lozano’s work and its reception.