Some Spaces Left
Lothar Götz
2nd May - 13th June 2014
Whilst Götz’ practice ranges in scale from site-specific wall paintings and room-sized spatial installations to paintings and drawings, there is a clear coherence and dialogue across his body of work through its continual referencing and engagement with ideas about architecture and space and its characteristic 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 idealized 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 cues off the identity of the person who is thought to live there, in a web of imaginative factors that continually feed into the geometrical arrangement of forms and the colour decisions for each drawing.
Götz sees colour as both beautiful and a key aspect of life that surrounds us, drawing comparison with another passion of his: gardens and flowers.
Whilst Götz often references the creation of a garden or the making of a piece of architecture in his work, he sees his practice as opposite in process to that of architectural design, which concretizes ideas and designs as built form, connecting it rather to the Classical idea of art as active fantasy - something practiced as part of a personal strategy to escape from reality.