Lothar Götz in front of his work 'Double–Take' at the MAC, Belfast, in 2013, photo by Jordan Hutchins
Lothar Götz’s practice ranges from site-specific wall paintings and room-sized spatial installations to paintings and drawings. There is a clear coherence across his body of work in its continual referencing and engagement with ideas about architecture and space; his painting is characterised by its use of abstract geometric forms, fields and lines of intense colour, juxtaposed with one another.
His work is informed by real factors of circumstance, site, or the particular inhabitants or histories of a building, space or place, but mixes these factors with further imaginary or fantasy ones. Similarly many of his drawings represent the floor plans of idealised dwellings, sometimes for specific people or historical figures, sometimes for imagined ones. Together they form part of an ongoing series exploring spatial ideas for domestic spaces: apartments, houses, bungalows, villas.
Colour in these drawings is used to denote the functions and atmospheres of rooms, or the situations and qualities of the surrounding landscape – whether a Schloß set in a meadow or a bungalow overlooking the sea. It also takes its cue from the imagined identity of the supposed occupier: a web of imaginative factors continually feed into the geometrical arrangement of forms and colour. Götz sees colour as both beautiful and a fundamental aspect of life that surrounds us. He often references his favourite flowers, the design of a garden, or a piece of architecture in his work, seeing his practice as opposite in process to that of architectural design, which renders ideas concrete as built form. Lothar Götz is more interested in the classical idea of art as active fantasy – something practised as part of a personal strategy to escape from reality.
- Contemporary Art Society
Biography: Götz has just completed a large scale commission for Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, and 2010 he contributed a major work to an international showcase exhibition on wall-painting at the Miró Foundation in Barcelona. Public commissions include Platform for Art at Piccadilly Circus underground station in 2007; a collaboration with Caruso St John Architects at the Arts Council England Offices in 2008 and a commission at Haymarket Metro Station, Newcastle in 2009. Götz has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad. Solo shows include DOMOBAAL, London, 2012; the Petra Rinck Gallery, Düsseldorf 2009; rahncontemporary in Zürich, 2008; MMKI Düsseldorf, 2005 and Museum Goch, Düsseldorf, 2004. Group shows include David Risley Gallery, London, 2007; mima, Middlesborough, 2007; the Contemporary Art Society’s ARTfutures, Bloomberg SPACE, 2005; and shows in Amsterdam; Dublin; Hamburg; Hanover; Salamanca; Wilhelmshaven and Wuppertal since 2005, including participation in the 2008 Prague Triennale.