In Conversation: Paul McCarthy & Tala Madani on Lee Lozano

On the occasion of the opening of ‘Lee Lozano. Hard Handshake,’ please join us in the Garden on Saturday 1 November at 11 am for a conversation between artists Paul McCarthy and Tala Madani with curator Ingrid Schaffner. Together they will discuss Lozano’s bold artistic legacy and fascinating life through this exhibition, which features a wide-ranging series of over 100 drawings created between 1959 and 1968.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Hauser & Wirth Publishers has released ‘In the Studio: Lee Lozano,’ a new book focused on Lozano’s life and work, written by Lucrezia Calabrò Visconti, and an excellent resource for both newcomers and longtime admirers of Lozano’s radical work.
This event is free, however, reservations are recommended.
About ‘Lee Lozano. Hard Handshake’
‘Lee Lozano. Hard Handshake’ brings together over 100 drawings by the artist, spanning the years 1959 to 1968. Lee Lozano made these provocative drawings at a remarkably fast pace, using a variety of artistic styles. Informed by the artist’s unsparing eye and wry humor, they dissect such societal norms as gender roles and property ownership while challenging the commodification of art and, ultimately, all conventional aspects of life.
Shown together, Lozano’s drawings embody her unbridled energy and social consciousness, radical for their time, and continue to provoke questions today. Although rarely exhibited during her lifetime, this body of work is instrumental to understanding the singular trajectory of Lozano's practice.
About The Estate of Lee Lozano
Lee Lozano’s paintings are admired for their energy, daring physicality and tirelessness in investigating the body and issues of gender. Although lauded by Lucy Lippard in 1995 as the foremost female conceptual artist of her time, Lozano had disengaged herself from the New York art world completely by the early 1970s. She left behind a body of work of striking formal breadth and complexity. Lozano fought to consolidate her artistic self in a realm void of systems, rules, and group consciousness. She pursued a wholly independent solo studio practice, which culminated in her rejection of the New York art world and a boycott of women. She first refused to attend public art world functions and withdrew from exhibitions, finally relocating to Dallas, Texas. ‘By refusing to speak to women,’ says curator Helen Molesworth, ‘she exposed the systematic and ruthless division of the world into categories of men and women. By refusing to speak to women as an artwork, she also refused the demand of capitalism for the constant production of private property… The strategy of rejection is a powerful one.’
About Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums—from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting.
During the 1990s, he extended his practice into installations and stand-alone sculptural figures, utilizing a range of materials such as fiberglass, silicone, animatronics and inflatable vinyl. Playing on popular illusions and cultural myths, fantasy and reality collide in a delirious yet poignant exploration of the subconscious, in works that simultaneously challenge the viewer’s phenomenological expectations.
Whether absent or present, the human figure has been a constant in his work, either through the artist‘s own performances or the array of characters he creates to mix high and low culture, and provoke an analysis of our fundamental beliefs. These playfully oversized characters and objects critique the worlds from which they are drawn: Hollywood, politics, philosophy, science, art, literature, and television. McCarthy’s work, thus, locates the traumas lurking behind the stage set of the American Dream and identifies their counterparts in the art historical canon.
McCarthy earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from USC in 1973. For 18 years, he taught performance, video, installation, and art history in the New Genres Department at UCLA, where he influenced future generations of west coast artists and he has exhibited extensively worldwide. McCarthy’s work comprises collaborations with artist-friends such as Mike Kelley and Jason Rhoades, as well as his son Damon McCarthy.
About Tala Madani
Tala Madani makes paintings and animations whose indelible images bring together wide-ranging modes of critique, prompting reflection on gender, political authority, and questions of who and what gets represented in art. Her work is populated by mostly naked, bald, middle-aged men engaged in acts that push their bodies to their limits. Bodily fluids and beams of light emerge from their orifices, generating metaphors for the tactile expressivity of paint. In Madani’s work, slapstick humor is inseparable from violence and creation is synonymous with destruction, reflecting a complex and gut-level vision of contemporary power imbalances of all kinds. Her approach to figuration combines the radical morphology of a modernist with a contemporary sense of sequencing, movement, and speed. Thus, her work finds some of its most powerful echoes in cartoons, cinema, and other popular durational forms.
About Ingrid Schaffner
Internationally admired as a curator, art critic, writer, and educator with nearly four decades of experience in the field of contemporary art, Schaffner is known for her generative and original scholarship focused on themes of archiving and collecting, photography, feminism, and alternate modernisms. Her 2013 exhibition ‘Jason Rhoades, Four Roads’ was the first American museum presentation of the sculptor’s work and was accompanied by a catalogue publication (Prestel); following its presentation at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, the exhibition traveled to Kunsthalle Bremen and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Schaffner was the curator of the 57th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in 2018. where she presented major installations by El Anatsui, Alex Da Corte, Zoe Leonard, Postcommodity and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, among others. From 2020 to 2023, she was the curator at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

Lee Lozano, No title, 1959 © The Estate of Lee Lozano. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zürich

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