Curated by Iris Müller-Westermann

“Smoking remains attractive,” Lee Lozano once noted, “because it is an excuse to make a little fire.” And indeed, this artist—who pointedly withdrew from the scene in 1972 and just as pointedly opted to “boycott women”—was known for making sparks fly. In the early 1960s, Lozano portrayed the polymorphously perverse: lewd, surreal cartoons of mouths, pricks, and pussies in various modes of assembly, which soon evolved into harder-edged “tool” paintings, equally rich with metaphoric association. Her later systems-based paintings and text pieces seem better behaved but in fact deeply complicate any notion of “cool” Conceptualism. Accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Jo Applin, Lucy R. Lippard, Benjamin Meyer-Krahmer, and the curator, this retrospective of some sixty paintings and hundreds of works on paper focuses on the vicissitudes of Lozano’s multifaceted, hot-and-bothered oeuvre.

— Johanna Burton