Hans-Christian Lotz

Initiated for his show at Lars Friedrich gallery in Berlin in 2011 and exhibited several times since – at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis in 2014 and most recently at David Lewis Gallery in New York this year – Hans-Christian Lotz’s ongoing project Rain Over Water functions as a series of containers. Crisp aluminium frames designed to house solar panels are re-purposed to hold items vacuum-sealed in plastic: printed circuit boards, drawings and (nearly always) pig brains. Despite their fairly straight­-forward production process, in person these roughly body-size panels aren’t so readily decipherable. As their outer surfaces are completely flat they appear at first like high-resolution prints of the objects they contain, glossing over the abject reality of the mate­rial just beyond the surface. How would they look, you might wonder, from behind?

Taken as a whole, Lotz’s work tends to point to what can broadly be thought of as intelligent commodities: pigs, for example, but also self-powered machines (water mills, aquaducts, solar panels) or those, containing motion sensors, that demonstrate a "smart" awareness of their surroundings. Further, especially in their flat, wall-mounted format, it may not be so strange to think of the Berlin-based artist’s works as also bearing a con­sistent, albeit open-ended, relationship to painting. Historically, there have been tendencies to think of a painting as having "flesh": consider, as an early example, when in 1867 the writer Émile Zola described Edouard Manet’s oeuvre as comprising the artist’s "flesh and blood." More recently the writer Isabelle Graw has pointed to our susceptibility to regard paintings as independent subjects capable of thought. Graw has offered the term "quasi-person" to identify this illusory subjectivity, locating it in relation to the way that many paintings bear an explicit, physical connection to their producer. Lotz’s objects elicit a similar effect to the one Graw describes, but with at least two key differ­ences: whatever traces of activity you might find in them rarely lead back to the author, and whatever "subjectivities" might seem to teem beneath their surfaces are generally not human.

Highly contained and with a conciseness that makes them appear logically derived, Lotz’s work can at first seem slightly cold. As the artist Peter Wächtler, who co-ran the Brussels project space Sotoso with Lotz from their shared apartment, has put it, his works evince a "highly professional manner" that can make the objects feel almost generic. Yet this quality is perhaps the crux of Lotz’s expressive language: the barely touched, neutral packaging allows "expressivity" to be wrested from the author, leaving room for the objects to speak and perform in a language of their own. This was the case with the dirty, smudged refrigerator doors, Format das hieß Psychoscape (2009), which Lotz salvaged from junkyards and mounted on the gallery walls for his eponymous exhibition at the Oktogon, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, in 2009, where chaotic histories of use, wear and abandonment congealed into something mirroring painterly intention. Similarly, the mixture of chemicals and animal juice in Rain Over Water often results in strange puckers in the plastic that radiate outward from the pig brains like auras, managing to evoke equally the bleeding gestural marks of artists like Helen Frankenthaler and the outward spread of bacterial colonies in a Petri dish. Similarly, other aspects of the work’s content threaten to override their highly controlled format: when you consider that it’s unknown how long the organic matter sealed within these plastic casings will last, for example, or when a Radio Frequency Iden­tification Chip embedded in Rain Over Water suggests its implication within an external, unseen system. Lotz’s inclination toward the surreal emerges the more you spend time with his work. Using the artificial, white cube aesthetic almost as another kind of readymade, Lotz slyly nudges the achingly familiar into the realm of the uncanny.

Born 1980 in Hamburg, Germany, Lotz currently lives and works in Berlin. He is represented by David Lewis gallery in New York. In addition to solo shows at David Lewis, Lotz's work has been featured internationally at art institutions including Dominique Lévy in New York, Martos gallery in New York, and Galerie Emanuel Layr in Vienna, and has been covered by publications such as frieze and Artforum. 

Text courtesy of Scott Roben