Art review: Lee Lozano: Slip, Slide, Splice, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

According to the late American artist Lee Lonzano, Kaspar Konig, a German museum director, had once said to her “You are a good painter and a nice girl.” “Wrong on both counts!”, she claims to have retorted, “I am a very good artist and not a nice girl.” Whatever else, Lozano had attitude, and from about 1960 her principled pugnacity drove her career through a decade of remarkable creativity. In the end, however, turning her life itself into art in a search to bypass the artwork became self-defeating. She withdrew from the art world. She lived on until 1999, but by 1972 her career as an artist had ended. Slip, Slide, Splice at the Fruitmarket gives a good introduction to her work, even if there is an inherent paradox in reincorporating this rebel into the art world she rejected.