Drawings 1958–64

A 640-page brick of a book that finally gives Lee Lozano's drawings the scale her paintings have long enjoyed: six years of graphite and crayon in which hammers, screwdrivers and light switches are drawn as bodies, and bodies as tools.

Published by Karma in September 2021, the volume gathers 568 color reproductions of work made between 1958 and 1964, the period in which Lozano moved from raw figurative sketches to the anthropomorphized tool drawings that remain her most confrontational work. Genitals are rendered as machine parts, plugs and sockets are read for exactly what they suggest, and the human figure is attacked outright as a design failure. Two essays commissioned for the book, by Helen Molesworth and Tamar Garb, take the drawings on their own terms rather than as a prologue to the later conceptual pieces. Molesworth: “For Lozano, connection is fraught and hairy. Connection is dangerous.” Bound in orange cloth at 9 by 7 1/4 inches.

Lee Lozano (1930–99) trained in Chicago, arrived in New York in 1960, made the large Wave paintings, and then in 1971 withdrew from the art world altogether, treating the withdrawal as her final work and extending it into a decades-long refusal to speak to women. Karma has published her steadily, issuing the Private Book notebooks in facsimile alongside Lozano c. 1962.