By the time she left art school in New York in 1967, Christine Kozlov (1945–2005) was part of a radical new direction in art practice that became known as Conceptual Art. This exhibition reveals the scope of Kozlov’s activity, with a focus on her contributions to Conceptual Art from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, shown with work by a network of her peers.
Conceptual Art emerged as a theoretical and left political position that rejected the high modernism, Minimalism and Pop Art that dominated the discourse of the mid-to-late 1960s. Valuing the production of ideas over objects, foregrounded by language, works of Conceptual Art were often made using readily available materials such as office supplies and photocopies, and devices to hand such as typewriters and sound recorders. Works were readymades, or took the form of documentation or information. Many conceptual artists tilted toward the politics of daily life and antiauthoritarian protest. From 1968 through to the mid-1970s, the positions and camps of global Conceptual Art were represented predominantly in the form of group exhibitions, some of which Kozlov coorganised. Nearly all of the works Kozlov contributed to these exhibitions will be on view here.
A broader context for this way of working and Kozlov’s thinking is raised in the exhibition through the relationships between her artworks and those of her friends and interlocutors. These include stanley brouwn, Douglas Huebler, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Adrian Piper and Lawrence Weiner. Collective and group work absorbed Kozlov from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s. This exhibition reflects her collaborations with The Red Krayola, as well as Art & Language, Joan Jonas and Robert Rauschenberg. Kozlov moved to the UK in 1977. The last of her works in this exhibition was made here, in response to the first Gulf War.
Conceptual Art and Christine Kozlov is curated by Rhea Anastas in cooperation with the Christine Kozlov Estate.
