A handsome and hefty clothbound compendium of Lozano’s explorations of gender through drawing

This 640-page volume comprises drawings from a critical six-year period in the development of American painter and conceptual artist Lee Lozano’s (1930-99) practice. Her daring, facetious sketches investigate issues of gender and the body through the erogenous anthropomorphization of tools.

Lee Lozano: Drawings 1958-64 includes two newly commissioned essays by Helen Molesworth and Tamar Garb. What I love about Lozano–besides the crazy, ham-fisted quality of her drawn line, pictures made with pencils that appear to have been held with a fist–is how her demonstration of the word ‘connection’ is not bound to any of the anodyne ways we currently use it, writes Molesworth. There’s nothing about ‘listening’ or ‘building community’ or ‘empathy’ in any of these drawings. For Lozano, connection is fraught and hairy. Connection is dangerous.