Lee Lozano, who was active in New York in the nineteen-sixties, began her artistic career at the start of that decade with expressive drawings and paintings featuring a conspicuous number of erect penises and phallic forms. She later painted tools on large-format canvases, moving ever closer to abstraction and conceptual painting, and finally, towards the end of the decade, developed what she called “Language Pieces” – written instructions with which she transformed her life into art through clearly imposed rules, demonstrating a rigorous desire for form that is rarely pursued so consistently. In 1972, Lozano – increasingly disappointed by art’s social ineffectiveness – even orchestrated her final exit from the art world with her Dropout Piece, which she did not revisit before her death in 1998.

No Title from 1967 stands at a tipping point in Lozano’s oeuvre. The figurative elements that defined her early work have receded almost entirely, giving way to clear, basic geometric forms. Created immediately before Lozano’s renowned Wave Paintings series, with which she took a further step towards abstraction and conceptual painting, this work nevertheless still includes figurative traces. A bright monochrome semicircle is visible at the top right-hand corner of the slim vertical format that is typical of her works from this period. It is delimited by blue tones applied with a dry brush; the brushstrokes are clearly oriented towards the curved lines of the form. The essentially abstract image suggests a tunnel – an optical illusion, a vista or a passageway.