Lutz Braun

Within the framework of Lutz Braun's errare ab origine, Saenger Galería organizes the presentation of the book Abstrakter Realismus. Malerei 1998-2023.

The artist's work possesses a temperament that he shares with both the tradition and the contemporaneity of Northern European art. This trait can be appreciated in his use of complementary and lackluster color to convey a mood or to create an atmosphere, or in the severe pulse shown in his drawings, in the economy of the compositions and in the choice of motifs that he explores with a keen sense of irony and biting wit. A conceptual aspect of Lutz Braun's exercise results from the decision not to date his works and thus create a continuous and uninterrupted flow; a body of work that suggests wandering at random along the paths of art history and that offers an original conception of time in painting, “as if all the paintings were present at the same time or had always been there”*. This correlates with another of the fundamental axes of his work, the notion of the journey. “It is a very common motif, especially in German painting and culture: tracing a path by going back into the depths of time and space, undertaking the search for an origin as a source of inspiration for individuality and identification. This idea of an artistic expedition has appealed to me from an early age and has led me to undertake more than one journey, whether it be walking from Berlin to Cologne, from Leipzig to Bayreuth, walking through the desert near Real de Catorce or all along the Insurgentes Avenue in Mexico City. I have also made several walks through the Scandinavian forests in search of abandoned farms, in one of them I found a 1969 newspaper with the moon landing on the front page”. In this regard, Braun has noted that his development led him to an artistic and existential breaking point: “After my efforts –which to me seemed to be searches for my true self, for some kind of artistic essence or a place of destiny– I discovered that my explorations were deeply solitary, anti-modern and delusional. At the same time, these experiences gave me clarity about my deep connection, attachment and solidarity with nature, ecology and humanity.” The artist illustrates this with an anecdote that, despite having occurred in the distant past, remains significant today: “Once, twenty years ago, a long, desperate scream came from a tent in the woods; in there, a beetle climbed up my face and tried to crawl into my ear. Beyond this miserable sense of irony, that scream marked a point from which my work shifted focus away from romanticism and expressionism, toward historical materialism and a desire for a liberated society in which we have 'overthrown all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, abandoned, and despised being': the categorical imperative in Karl Marx”. Lutz Braun continues in the same way with his work that has shifted from a search for an identity to a way of wandering through the world. Somewhere between unintentionally straying from his origin and “getting it wrong from the start” out of conviction, Braun's paintings trace a timeless cartography that is strongly embedded in an awareness of the self and its prosperous or adverse avatars that guide, to a large extent, the indeterminate aimless journey of the artist and his work.

–Saenger Galería

* Interview with Alma Wood, published in Lutz Braun. Abstrakter Realismus. Malerei 1998-2023, Walther König Art Publishers, Cologne, 2024.

Gallery participating in GAMA WEEK from September 19 to 22, 2024: