PRESS RELEASE
LORIENNE LOTZ | Thinking Out Loud
May 5 – Jun 3, 2023
Lorienne Lotz | Thinking Out Loud
5 May - 3 June 2023
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The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us. – Audre Lorde (author, poet, human rights activist)
Everard Read London presents an exhibition of six new oil paintings by South African artist, Lorienne Lotz.
With these new paintings, Lotz continues to explore motifs of oppression, by responding to the insanity of war and in this case, the patriarchal, imperialistic fantasies, and
performances of the protagonists. The brutal colonial system in what was then Rhodesia, into which she was born and raised, is now Zimbabwe, a system that has now devolved into an oligarchic reign of terror and corruption, profoundly impacting her psyche, her life, and her work.
But the political is also personal. By rendering the covert overt, the unconscious conscious, she has been attempting to confront in her work ‘that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within’. Thus, Lotz’s work excavates the ironies that emerge from our deepest narratives, which oscillate between good and evil, order and chaos and the beauty and beast within us all to reveal the ambivalence of our divided hearts.
By balancing chance tactics, fine attention, and deep contemplation, the physical act of her painting mirrors her interiority. She draws from art historical references that tend to reverberate through time and yet are still relevant within our contemporary society. This for her reinforces how the absurdity of our human condition is endlessly repeated; a hint of suggestion via a charcoal sketch here, a nearly invisible reference there, are features of her work that frequently manifest as a sometimes hidden, sometimes exposed playful edge, which simultaneously belies a collective despair at our beingness and reveals its macabre humour.
Lotz continues to challenge the process of her artmaking by giving authority to the relevant, poignant questions of our times and of our very humanness.
This is Lorienne Lotz’s first solo presentation with Everard Read London and her fourth with the Everard Read group.
