Abstract

This latest body of work by Lothar Götz – on show here – is his most personal yet. It has been inspired by memories of the house he grew up in, which were rekindled when he recently cleared it out after his mother’s death, before its subsequent sale. The house, built by his parents in the 1950s and where he lived all his childhood, had over recent years – due to his mother’s dementia – become frozen in time – without any changes to its rooms or the furniture and ephemera they contained – books, pictures, ornaments and carpets. ‘It drew me back and unleashed memories from my childhood which suddenly seemed very close again,’ explains Götz.

Realising the importance that the house’s design and contents had to his work, he has explored this in the series of works exhibited here – including wall paintings and drawings inspired by the original architect’s floor plans, watercolours based around the stone crazy paving his father laid on the balcony, and the repeated lozenge shape of the traditional timber Jägerzaun – hunter’s fence – which surrounded the garden – which has become a motif that often appears in his work. ‘The house – and the dreams and visions of it I had as a boy – was almost like a person to me – and ever since I have reacted very strongly to buildings and spaces: it’s an underlying theme in my work.

The title for the show came from one of his mother’s books he found in the house – the only one he ever remembered her talking about: ‘Der geschenkte Gaul’ by the actress, singer – and gay icon – Hildegard Knef – who’s face on the cover he remembered vividly from childhood. It’s title ‘The Gift Horse’ in English comes from an equivalent saying, ‘to never look a gift horse in the mouth’ – meaning you should never reject what you are given: despite all its problems or difficulties. In Knef’s book – which was published in 1970 and is autobiographical – she uses the phrase to relate to her own life, which she saw as a gift despite it having been uncomfortable and traumatic at times – particularly from having lived through the last years of Nazi Germany and the end of the war – just as Götz’s mother – of the same generation – had also done.

For Götz he uses the phrase here to relate to his own life, to denote the gift of the house – his inheritance – but also the complex and sometimes uncomfortable feelings it rekindled ­– of growing up gay, his difficult relationship with his parents and love/hate relationship with the house and his hometown. ‘The house was very important to me – I still dream about it – but at the same time there is no way for me to live there. Being gay was one of the reasons to leave, to escape.’

These contradictory feelings Götz says are reflected in the work in the show, which he describes as an ‘abstraction of nostalgia’ – combining two seemingly contradictory things: hard-edged abstraction that draws on and translates feelings invoked by the often decorative furnishings – and even spießig nick-nacks and souvenirs – in the house. This was encapsulated by a daily phenomenon – for a few minutes each morning and depending on the weather or time of year – when the sun would catch the hanging crystal droplets of a chandelier in the house’s dining room: scattering rays of light prismatically around the room, peppering it with tiny rainbows and facets of pure colour. ‘We used to call it ‘Das Wunder’ – it was like the colours came to life’, says Götz, ‘And my work here is my attempt to break out of my feelings and memories for the house being purely nostalgic or sentimental too, to turn these into something positive – something wonderful – and not just to look backwards.’