Abstract

Lothar Götz
»Conversations With The Devil«

A selection from the current works by the artist Lothar Götz, who lives in London, is being shown from 5 September to 30 October 2014 in the Petra Rinck Galerie, entitled Conversations with the Devil.

Produced over the last two years, the works on wood and paper distinguish themselves from earlier ones by their almost exclusive occupation with the line, mathematically speaking, the shortest distance between two points on a flat plane, actually a geometric banality.

Lothar Götz’s works from the past years, including his large-scale wall paintings, refer to both physically real and visionary architecture, to existing and fictive floor plans, as well as to feelings and moods triggered by these or that can be associated with them. These often stand in context with specific places, persons or groups of people (e.g., houses for Mario Botta, a city residence for an artist). These pieces are defined by simple and complex geometric forms against a brightly coloured ground.

The object of the current study is an architecture of remembrance that is associated with the artist’s special personal experience. The exhibition title Conversations with the Devil alludes to just such a personal experience that sparked the work group of line drawings. Woven together, the individually coloured and glossy metallic lines can hardly be distinguished from one another. Close together, they jostle and overlap each other up to an optimal density.

In most of the works on display here, there are no objects, no concrete form that the eye can take in, only shimmery colour fields that you can submerge in. It is solely in a series of Din A4 works that Götz, taking up other forms of geometry, adds circles and circular segments, thus spanning a bridge to his earlier works.

In the pieces on show, Götz is interested in the processual procedure, the duration of the drawing act, applying the material, dragging the coloured pencil alongside the ruler, the repetitive and ever same gesture, modifying a memory by visualizing it.