“As a boy, I was obsessed with architecture, spending most of my time exploring every building site in our small town [of Günzburg, Germany] and creating a kind of fantasy world of my own around them,” says artist Lothar Götz, who specializes in murals and large-scale spatial installations. It was during his visual communications and graphic design studies that he was first drawn to Modernism and the Bauhaus, which he credits as inspiration for his bold works.
Götz, who is now based in the UK, continued his studies in aesthetics, fine art, and painting because “I couldn’t decide for some time which art form to choose,” he says. Then, while completing his master’s degree in painting at the Royal College of Art London, he decided “to combine my various interests within my site-specific wall painting practice.”
His arresting murals and wall pieces are studies in bright colors, which he applies densely in geometric shapes that he says make him feel happy and fulfilled. They are also a response to Germany’s Nazi history, when abstract, modern art was deemed “degenerate art” and banned.
Götz’s Fairground Abstract at the Hatton Gallery in England
Naturally, the sites themselves are also vital to his process, and a basic tenet of his work is to be responsive to the architecture. “I need to feel the space, its dimensions, material quality, the changing light conditions, and the immediate surroundings,” he says. Take the Brewers Towner Commission in Eastbourne, UK, where his geometric Dance Diagonal draws on the building’s angles for an abstract, vivid masterpiece. “For me, colors stand for freedom,” he says. “They are what they are without any excuse.”
The geometric Dance Diagonal adorns the exterior of Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne, UK
Photography by Ben A. Pruchnie and Jim Stephenson
This article originally appeared in HD’s February 2020 issue.
