Tools

Tools reproduces the black-and-white drawings of screwdrivers, wrenches, and hammers that Lee Lozano made in 1963 and 1964, the earliest sustained body of work by an artist who later withdrew from the New York art world altogether.

Published by An Art Service in an edition of 500 unnumbered copies, the hardcover book is illustrated throughout with Lozano's early tool drawings and includes an essay by Sabine Folie. Bound in orange cloth with black lettering and issued without a dust jacket, it was produced for an exhibition of Lozano's work at Hauser & Wirth's New York galleries in 2011.

Lozano developed the tool motif further in the Tool Paintings of 1963-66, in which the same screwdrivers and wrenches appear anthropomorphized in sexualized poses alongside provocative texts. She later gave up figuration for the monochrome Wave paintings, and in February 1969 began the General Strike Piece, the first of several conceptual works through which she withdrew from public exhibition; her work drew little institutional attention again until a series of exhibitions beginning in the late 1990s.