Kirjahaku

An illuminating study of an overlooked artist from the 1960s whose work has recently returned to the limelight This is the first in-depth study of the idiosyncratic ten-year career of Lee Lozano (1930–1999), assuring this important artist a key place in histories of post-war art. The book charts the entirety of Lozano’s production in 1960s New York, from her raucous drawings and paintings depicting broken tools, genitalia, and other body parts to the final exhibition of her spectacular series of abstract “Wave Paintings” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970. Highly regarded at the time, Lozano is now perhaps best known for Dropout Piece (1970), a conceptual artwork and dramatic gesture with which she quit the art world. Shortly afterwards she announced she would have no further contact with other women. Her “dropout” and “boycott of women” lasted until her death, by which time she was all but forgotten. This book tackles head-on the challenges that Lozano poses to art history—and especially to feminist art history—attending to her failures as well as her successes, and arguing that through dead ends and impasses she struggled to forge an alternative mode of living. Lee Lozano: Not Working looks for the means to think about complex figures like Lozano whose radical, politically ambiguous gestures test our assumptions about feminism and the “right way” to live and work.

Alison Wilding RA (b.1948) is one of Britain's foremost sculptors. Tracing the trajectory of her artistic evolution, this original publication provides the first critical survey of Wilding's rich career. Known for her use of contrasting materials and often pairing forms in precarious juxtapositions and balancing acts, recent works combine string, steel and hair, mirrored glass, silicone rubber, alabaster, sand and painted foam. Resisting categorisation, Wilding's sculptural language steps beyond the so-called 'new sculpture' which emerged within Britain in the 1980s, to embrace the European and American vocabularies for producing large-scale abstract sculpture that appeared from the 1960s onwards. Drawing on extensive interviews with the artist and referencing numerous secondary sources, this impeccably researched and beautifully produced publication will situate Wilding's work within its rightful place in the history of modern abstract sculpture.