Johannes Lotz – Everything Becomes Musak
15 September—22 October 2007
Galerie Michael Janssen, Cologne

Johannes Lotz (*1975) will show medium sized paintings in muted colours in Indian ink and tempera on canvas as well as lacquered and painted wooden doors in his second solo exhibition for Michael Janssen.

The monochromatic as well as abstractly painted doors are interspersed with poetic forms clearly bearing reference to Johannes Lotz’s drawings. The surface of the drawings is covered with waves of ballpoint pen lines and form in the background copious fantastic landscapes, abstract ornaments or baroque interiors. In the foreground they densify to form houses, people and mythical creatures. Instead of using a ballpoint pen on paper, he applied a ne drill to the doors; with it, Lotz carved ornaments and gures into the coloured wooden surface. Wherever the wood is fully per- forated a filigree structure reminding of faded lace emerges. The transformed doors generate a formal tension by both functioning as classical panel and as object in space.
What already presented itself in some of the drawings is continued in the paintings. Foreground and background can- not be clearly separated; the picture planes are completely covered with dynamic elements, that refer back to early cubistic and expressionist traditions. Structured in the same colourfulness and materiality as their surroundings, many of the title-inspiring figures free themselves from the mainly abstract pictorial carpet only on closer inspection.

Lotz sees his paintings as a ‘translation of life’. His figures, that seem to be lost and isolated in their contorted surroundings, symbolise man, isolated in an ambiguous world full of contradictions.

Johannes Lotz, who studied painting in the years 1995 to 2004, lives and works in Munich.

Johannes Lotz, Everything Becomes Musak, Installation view, 2007, Galerie Michael Janssen, Cologne