STOCKHOLM.- This is the first retrospective exhibition in the Nordic region of Lee Lozano (1930-1999), the American artist whose original and challenging work is still largely unknown, especially in Europe. Lozano was part of the 1960s art scene in New York, an artists’ artist in the midst of the avant-garde of the time. On the border between minimalism and conceptual art, she created a powerful and individualistic body of work in a completely male-dominated environment.

Some sixty paintings and hundreds of works on paper and text-based works from the period 1960-1972 are featured in this exhibition, which is produced by Moderna Museet: the early “surrealist” paintings, sexually evocative and charged with both humour and aggressiveness, on to her gigantic so-called tool paintings, some of which are up to six metres long, and The Wave Series. Some of Lozano’s conceptual “language pieces”, representing her development towards immateriality, are also included in this presentation in the main hall of Moderna Museet.

Lee Lozano was an idiosyncratic artist, largely going against the grain of her contemporary scene. In 1971, for instance, she caused controversy with her boycott of women – a project in the form of an “examination”. The Drop Out Piece (1972) was Lozano’s defection from the New York art scene. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in her unique artistic oeuvre, in acknowledgement of its width and depth. After her death, Lee Lozano’s work has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in the USA and Europe, including at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and documenta 12 in Kassel.