Rachel Lachowicz is an American artist based in Los Angeles, California. She is primarily recognized for appropriating canonical works by modern and contemporary male artists such as Carl Andre and Richard Serra and recreating them using red lipstick.
Lachowicz’s practice includes sculpture, painting, performance, and other media. Her work complicates established divisions between abstraction and the body, appropriation and homage, the cosmetic and the artistic, commodities and crafts, subjectivity and objectification. In the 1990s she was associated with a movement termed 'Lipstick Feminism', which also claimed artists such as Janine Antoni. Lipstick feminists embraced sexuality and feminized modes of body crafting such as utilizing makeup while articulating critiques of male domination.
Appropriation and Materials
Since the 1980s, the artist’s appropriations have articulated a feminist position regarding the exclusion of women from art history and the continued inequities that women experience in the art world today. Her work raises questions that exceed the purview of appropriation, as her complex utilization of materials and rigorous production process push a wide range of established boundaries. Apart from quoting iconic art made by men, Lachowicz further subverts that male canon through her use of lipstick, generally associated with femininity, as a material. Through this choice of material, Lachowicz explores issues of consumption, cosmetic politics, family ritual, embodiment, and abstraction.
"Red Not Blue," 1992
Her performance Red Not Blue of 1992 gained attention in the art world for her provocative reinterpretation of artist Yves Klein Anthropométries performance of 1960. In Red Not Blue Lachowicz marked the nude body of a muscular man with red lipstick wax and instructed him to press his body against large pieces of paper in order to create silhouettes of his form. There was a live audience present at the performance, which took place at the Shohsana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica, California, and there was a violinist playing throughout its duration. Beyond an inversion of the male gaze, Red Not Blue explored the politics of gendered embodiment by emphasizing the materiality of the male body, which often enjoys the empowered status of abstract personhood in contrast to the hypermateriality of the female body.
"Sarah," 1993
One of Lachowicz’s most well known works is the sculpture titled Sarah in which she recreated noted minimalist artist Richard Serra’sOne Ton Prop sculpture from 1969 utilizing red lipstick wax.
"Lay Back and Enjoy It," 2017
In 2017, Lachowicz created an immersive installation at Shoshana Mayne Gallery in Santa Monica which engaged with themes of violence against women. The title of the exhibition, Lay Back and Enjoy It, sets the foundation and is a reference to basketball coach Bobby Knight's infamous comment regarding sexual assault. The artist comments on this behavior by recreating life-size structures of patriarchal authority--a church and a Sheriff's station--and coating them in her signature red lipstick. The structures themselves are references to movie sets for the 1973 Clint Eastwood film, High Plains Drifter, which illustrates two sexual assaults. The show was Lachowicz's seventh solo-exhibition.
