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Things Fall Apart
25 January, 2022 - 5 February, 2022
Mike Lutz
Things Fall Apart
25 January – 5 February 2022
hours:
Tuesday – Friday 11am to 5pm,
Saturday 11am to 3pm
admission: Free
an affirmation of hope that we have become stronger for having walked through the fire.
The works in Things Fall Apart rise out of the disquieting period from which we are emerging. Each painting considers an aspect of confinement and release.
Ranging in focus from individual emotions through strained relationships, to the interaction with the environments we inhabit, the motifs are diverse, yet hold together through the common thread of shared experience.
The exhibition highlights the stresses and challenges faced by the individual and how we can become consumed by our own immediate concerns. We are reminded that its not always about us and that we can become full of our own importance both as individuals and as a species. There is a recognition that having to choose between ourselves as individuals and the society we live in is an illusion. We are both and it cannot be otherwise.
Painting in a nominally figurative realist mode, Mike’s expressive use of paint is central to the mood of the exhibition.
Notwithstanding the isolation and withdrawal, there is a recognition that life goes on and though drawing on the dark emotions that trying times can produce, there is an affirmation of hope that we have become stronger for having walked through the fire.
This is Mike’s first solo show.
Mike Lutz
Hailing from the UK, Mike has lived in Melbourne since 2006 and has a Graduate Certificate in Visual Art from the Victorian College of the Arts and a Masters in Fine Art from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
Mike’s practice is driven by a disrupted figuration that is centred on the impact that painting has on both the painter and the viewer. By submitting to an intuitive approach to mark making, his work conveys a mood of disquiet and psychological intensity.
Working primarily in oil, he uses a painterly approach to surface, colour, tonality and scale to derive unsettling and ambiguous imagery.
Contrasting the rational production of realist imagery with expressive mark-making, the subconscious, irrationality and chance Mike leaves us with a disrupted view of the world embedded in the material and temporal qualities of the paint.
Education
Master of Fine Art – Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (2021)
Graduate Certificate in Visual Art – Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne University (2018)
Solo Exhibitions
2022 Things Fall Apart, fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne
Group Exhibitions
2021 ALLone, Satellite Projects, Melbourne
2021 MFA Graduate Show, RMIT
2019 Fifty Squared, Brunswick Street Gallery, Fitzroy
2018 Small, Forty-five Downstairs, Melbourne
2018 Unplugged, GCVA Graduate Show VCA Art Space Melbourne
2017 VCA short course students’ exhibition Besser Space, Collingwood