Rachel Lachowicz: Cockeyed

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Cockeyed, a survey of Rachel Lachowicz’s work spanning 1991–2026. The exhibition brings into focus a sustained practice that returns to and reconstructs established forms—cubes, grids, and bodies—using materially coded substances such as lipstick, powder, and wax. Rather than separating form from its history, Lachowicz keeps that connection intact, altering how it is carried and encountered. The form remains, but rebuilt in these materials, it operates under different terms. The exhibition will be on view from April 4, 2026 through May 23, 2026 with an opening reception on Saturday April 4th from 4 to 6pm.

For over three decades, Lachowicz has been in active resistance and worked within canonical structures associated with modernism and Minimalism, remaking them rather than positioning herself outside them. Cosmetic materials do not function as surface; they take the place of the materials that typically secure these forms. Lipstick remains lipstick—bound to use, exchange, and the production of the body—and remains visible within the form. What has been treated as autonomous is shown to depend on those same terms. Lachowicz builds this dependency into the object, taking hold of forms that have historically excluded her and remaking them under her authorship.

Early works such as Molotov Cocktail make this position explicit. The object arrives already bound to use and consequence, yet it is not presented intact. It is remade—its function displaced, its material reconstituted—shifting from instrument to form without releasing it from violence. This insistence on construction is already present in Monochrome Red (1991), where lipstick is cast into repeated units and organized into a grid. The forms protrude and repeat—phallic, softened, multiplied past coherence. Lipstick builds the grid and does not disappear.

In One Week Late, Lachowicz introduces the hanger as an object already bound to a history of restricted access and bodily risk. The structure remains legible, but it no longer holds on its original terms. It does not operate as a symbol to be interpreted, but as a material that carries that history into the work. Lipstick remains present, but no longer rebuilds form. It sits on an object that neither holds nor resolves into a body.

Rachel Lachowicz (b. 1964) is the chair of the Art Department at Claremont Graduate University  and currently lives and works in Bakersfield, CA. She received a BFA from California Institute of the Arts and is currently a professor of studio art at Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA. Lachowicz has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Denver Art Museum; ICA, London; Benaki Museum, Athens; AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts Museum, Tianjin, China; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; New Museum, New York City; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Venice Bienanale (1993). Her work can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; the Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL, among many others.