Bracha L. Ettinger
SITE131 opens Dropout on Wednesday, April 13, 2016 from 5 to 9 pm. Guest-curated by Photios Giovanis, owner-curator of New York gallery Callicoon Fine Arts, the exhibition brings to Dallas this longtime colleague of SITE131’s co-founders Joan & Seth Davidow.
Dropout is triggered by the life and work of the idiosyncratic artist Lee Lozano. After a “short but major career” (Artforum, September 2006), Lozano removed herself from the art world. Leaving New York in the early 1970s, she eventually moved to Dallas, where she died at 68 in 1999. Two important solo exhibitions—PS 1 in 2004 and an international traveling retrospective in 2006—highlighted Lozano’s dramatically fast career. Surprisingly, Lozano’s work did not appear in Dallas: this exhibition brings the artist’s works, famous to scholars, to Dallas for the first time.
Lozano’s graphic and expressionistic painting and drawing work in Dropout sets the stage for five currently working artists form New York, Tel Aviv, and Los Angeles: Sadie Benning’s large scale wall works, A. K. Burns’ steel sculptures, Bracha L. Ettinger’s and Ulrike Müller’s oil paintings and works on paper, and Lee Revlas’ figurative sculptures.
At the peak of her involvement in the art world, in 1970 Lee Lozano began what she considered her most difficult work called Dropout Piece. Lozano’s Dropout Piece does not exist beyond the idea. It never took form in a physical space, performance, or object. Its only record appears in the artist’s personal notebook dated April 5, 1970. The work exists, in a sense, as Lozano’s removal from the art world. Within this context, according to curator Giovanis, Dallas appears as a site of non-production, a place where art in some other unrecognizable form ("dropping out") happens. “To invert this paradox, and to investigate the relationship between center and margins, the exhibition brings works by national and international artists to Dallas that evoke, in different ways, the work Lozano made while not dropped out,” states curator Giovanis.
Timed with preview week of the Dallas Art Fair, SITE131’s Dropout opens to the Dallas and Fair audiences and continues through June 4, 2016, at its new location on Payne Street in the Dallas Design District. Special thanks go to international gallery Hauser & Wirth, managers of Lee Lozano’s work, and to Photios Giovanis for bringing his talented curatorial vision to Texas.
On its path to ignite interest in contemporary art and the Dallas Art Fair, Dallas’ newest nonprofit kunsthalle (hall for art), SITE131 will be open and free to the public: Thursday through Saturday 12–5 pm during the Fair at its Dallas Design District site. In following weeks, SITE131 is open Fridays and Saturdays from 12 to 5pm or by appointment.
131 Payne Street, Dallas, Texas 75207. Email info@site131.com. SITE131.com under construction. For information, contact director | curator Joan Davidow: joan@site131.com.
