Abstract

The redemptive sense of this show’s title – with its suggestion of a place of safety and deliverance from earthly woe, finds an echo in the works here: their bursts of abstract space like an opening up of horizons after the closed-in ones of recent months.

Many works do though bear the mark of recent lockdown/s: their smaller size reflecting the domestic-size of the home studio space in which they were made. Even the wall-painting is reduced in scale compared with those usually associated with Götz, occupying the gallery’s domestic-scale chimney breast.

But these are works that are a celebration of the experience of painting as space, beyond the frame and the possibility of dreaming still: their intense blooms of colour like lights at the end of a tunnel.

Götz’s work has always had this sense of the redemptive, hinting at other better worlds, ideal visions beyond the day-to-day that reflect his interest in the art and design of the political and cultural utopias of the early 20th century such as the Bauhaus or Constructivism. This is seen most directly in the drawing: ‘The house of the worker’ inspired by a 1922 dress design by Aleksandr Rodchenko, a work that literally draws on and retrofits the past, using a sheet of paper taken from a vintage Ingres pad.

A more recent past resonates here too: Salvation being the name of a gay club-night which ran in Vauxhall for over 10 years from the late 1990s. The coronas of radiating lines and colours seen in works from the Disco series recall moments of unalloyed joy still possible and still remembered in the drug-induced delirium of clubbing.

Like strobes against the darkness around, these are works that take the viewer into an abstract freedom of space.