Stroke

By the mid-1960s, Lee Lozano was known for her monumental paintings of hardware. In the latter half of that decade, however, Lozano shifted gears, translating her signature style into a more sculptural language. With "Stroke" the artist broke free of the constraints of the canvas by perforating and layering canvases themselves. Using tools rather than depicting them, Lozano moved beyond two-dimensional painting to engage “real space” both in her process and in her finished work. Indeed, she referred to this body of work as “energy paintings,” aiming to capture “the energy which emanates from the forever conflict in painting between . . . its static solid-matter surface and the passages of movement and time it evokes in the mind.”