Hans-Christian Lotz

David Lewis is pleased to present Hans-Christian Lotz’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, his first since 2015.

Hans-Christian Lotz’s artistic approach has always impressed me with its sculptural use of the readymade to make literal aesthetic self-reflection.

The artist’s last show with David Lewis achieved this to a remarkable degree. By presenting a series of rehabilitated automated sliding doors as wall relief sculptures, the works’ audience was offered a scenario in which an especially beholding form of spectatorship was framed by the technical logistics manifest in these readymades—one that renders the temporal present into a spatial presence. Like a constructivist work in reverse, the accomplishment of this artistic presentation is a defamiliarization of the conditions of possibility realized in technologically-determined products; that the social relations indexed by the function of such products may not be commensurate to the force of production it likewise indexes. This is to imply that as much as you can behold it in thought, use or purchase power, it has a more effective interest in you and this “it” isn’t the thing itself, these doors, these circuited architectural sentinels, but the relations which compulsively put such watchmen up for hire.

The aluminum profiles, measuring volumes and the occasional instance of everyday errata arrayed in sequentially modulated ‘counts’ that make up Lotz’s present show continue the artist’s investigation of these sorts of baked-in effects that are a consequence of logistically-optimized material. While the magic lantern of mechanical automation is foregone this time around, I see it as a necessary step to take in order for these measured sequences of material to be understood as preconditions for what elsewhere is prized as technological. If not the armature, the manufactures with which we are presented can be categorized as some of the bare, constituent elements of late capitalist media. For their realization as artworks, they are modified by a straight-forward set of machine-driven procedures of cutting and abrading. The result of such presentations and procedures is a problematization of the isomorphism, that formal and relational identity of these goods within an ideal, crystalline world of infinite operation which conditions the possibility of their use, and is now posed as an aesthetic quality borne of semi-arithmetical counting operations.

The wearable is added to this ensemble in the form of Malene List Thomsen’s latex jackets. Realized by using leather jackets as a mold, these sculptures present a merchandise that has been negated, turned inside out, returned to artistic practice and its own problematization of goods—for sale or otherwise. I’d say this resonates with Lotz’s problematization of contemporary material and the relations it engenders; relations to the things, artistic or otherwise, that one either buys or doesn’t but nevertheless pile up all around.

- Sam Pulitzer

Hans-Christian Lotz (b. 1980, Hamburg) lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Kunstverein Freiburg; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin; Dominique Lévy, New York; David Lewis, New York; Christian Anderson, Copenhagen; Lars Friedrich, Berlin; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis, among others. Group exhibitions include Künstlerhaus Stuttgart; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; Wiels, Brussels; Artists Space, New York; Hacienda, Zürich; Francesca Pia, Zürich; Emanuel Layr, Rome/Vienna, among others.