Abstract

In Private

We are pleased to announce a new exhibition of work from Lothar Götz, which will be on view by appointment at the gallery from the 13 March onwards. We hope also to host a celebratory event to view the show later in its run, once this is permitted.

Götz’s latest work, produced predominantly during a year of intermittent lockdowns, can be seen as an exploration of what he describes as ‘the abstract space of the private’.

This engagement with the idea of the private comes in part from living under lockdown within the reduced horizons of domestic space: reflected in the smaller scale of many works here, produced in the studio of Götz’s London home.

The work however as much questions as reflects this notion of the private, the boundaries of which are increasingly blurred in any case given zoom business meetings in bedrooms and with instagram increasingly constructing and mixing our private and public personas together.

Götz describes his own experience of lockdown as a kind of exile, separated from the normal stimuli and range of experience, not least of gallery and museum-going. This is reflected in a core series of small drawings here, which are responses to other artists’ work seen in art books at home as opposed to in galleries, each being what he describes as a ‘private dialogue between an image and myself’. In particular, several works are responses to works by Paul Klee and what Götz describes as ‘the intimate quality of Klee’.

A further ‘green series’ of drawings meanwhile have their origin in memories from the artist’s last experience of wider horizons: walking in the Ramsau in Austria. These take as their cue the different type of privacy experienced in being on your own in the enclosed space of the forest – from the intricacies of the forest floor to views out between trees to mountains beyond.

Götz has chosen one drawing from each of these two series to be woven as rugs, objects that themselves speak in scale of domestic space. For the artist, they remind him specifically of childhood, when he describes lying on similar rugs as like ‘being on an island’, their patterning ‘a landscape in itself’ – an imaginary space taking him beyond domestic horizons.

Prominent is the inclusion of a single square wall painting in the show. This relates to his ‘kitchen disco’ series of paintings, inspired by listening to dance tracks at home while remembering the experience of going clubbing: of being locked into your own world on the dance floor, surrounded by strangers in the dark under flashing strobe lights. Unusually for Götz, whose wall paintings usually flood the whole wall surface, this sits as a defined space on the wall, its boundaries clearly demarcated. But the abstract shapes it contains are reminiscent of rays of light, suggestive of the revelation of complete freedom that can be felt on the dance-floor.