Lotte Lyon

“Souterrain”
January 20 – February 25
Opening Thursday 19 January 19-21h.

We are pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Lotte Lyon, “Souterrain,” from 20 January – 25 February 2012.

“Souterrain” will consist of new objects built in response to the gallery space, a wall painting, and recent photographs from 5 different series.

Lotte Lyon’s sculptures employ a pragmatism in the materials used, in the methods of assembly, and in the delivery of associative ideas. The two sculptures made for “Souterrain” respond to un-heroic architectural elements of the gallery space: the stairway leading from Beethovenplatz is matched with a stepped object propped against a large empty wall, and a small utility cabinet seems to have yielded a stack of boxes that could be drawers pulled out of an impossible space hidden by that cabinet. A wall painting transports the visitor from one space to the next, and a room filled with photographs makes it clear that Lotte Lyon’s staging is meant to give an impression of theatricality and performance, as much as they are referencing various Minimalist traditions.

In the catalogue produced for Lotte Lyon’s exhibition in 2010 at the Landesgalerie Linz, Midori Matsui describes the work as having a strategy of gestural, metonymical analogy, which connects the artist to an American Minimalist tradition by way of the performative elements of Robert Morris, the perceptual elements of Donald Judd and the associative elements of Robert Smithson. The element missing in this description, as Matsui points out, is the lightness in Lotte Lyon’s work, which has an important humorous element, and is carried out through the use of prefabricated two-dimensional materials, rather than solid mass. This work would just as readily find a lineage within a European tradition as well, Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, and Lily van der Stokker, as examples.

Lotte Lyon has exhibited in a number of Austrian institutions, including Landesgalerie Linz, Kunstpavilion Innsbruck, Camera Austria in Graz, Secession Vienna, the Jesuitenfoyer in Vienna, das weisse haus in Vienna, Galerie Stadtpark in Krems as well as a number of alternative spaces in Vienna including LOVE_, Area 53, and Kunstbuero. Internationally, the PS1 in New York, the MMC LUKA in Pula, Croatia, and the Austrian Cultural Forum in Tokyo. She shows extensively with Galerie Aoyama|Meguro in Tokyo.