Lotte Gertz I Mary Mary I 8 June – 4 August 2012

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Mary Mary is delighted to announce a solo exhibition by Glasgow based Lotte Gertz, her second at the gallery. Gertz’s latest series of paintings and prints were produced within the context of the artist’s studio occupying the same space as her general living-area. The works full of a sense of immediacy, result from her direct response to ‘close-at-hand’ materials
and objects.
These original sources are often incredibly varied and include items she repeatedly ‘stumbles-upon’ in the intimate chaos
that surrounds her as she works, as well as more ‘transcendental’ images, such as those gleaned from tiny German art-
book-catalogues which contain ‘thumbnail’ reproductions of masterpieces. Importantly these images are barely
recognisable and like the original sources of everyday ephemera, the viewer is only offered a glimpse amidst an all
encompassing approach to material where mark making, colour, choice, play and manipulation all form part of the
making process.
Pliny the Elder, the Roman scholar, used the term rhyparographos from the word rhyparos (meaning ‘waste material’) to
denote an artist engaged in everyday, corporeal subjects (‘still-lives’ or ‘genre’ paintings as they would later come to be
known in art-historical terminology).  Here Gertz’s own defiant rhyparograps, distilled from her varied range of starting-
points, include several paintings on muslin – itself a nod to domestic functionality. However from this somehow familiar
material, this fabric, when stretched and sized, is subject to an incongruous academic discipline, which works against its
more familiar form of curtain, hanging or clothing. The marks added to its surface, in rapid layers and impressions,
capture in their viscous beauty, the excitement of Gertz’s continual (re)discovery and material (re)invention of objects
both familiar and strange.
Born in Denmark in 1972, Gertz lives and works in Glasgow. Recent exhibitions include ‘Who Decides?’ Stadtgalerie
Mannheim; ‘Studio 58: Women Artists in Glasgow since WWII,’ Mackintosh Museumm Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (both
2012); ‘Houses Falling Away,’ Aberdabei, Copenhagen; ‘Two Tempers Running Zig Zag,’ Leven Street, Glasgow; ‘Interference
with twigs,’ Mary Mary, Glasgow & ‘Jerwood Contemporary Painters,’ Jerwood Space, London (all 2010).
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