Lenz Geerk at Gerhard Hofland

Artist: Lenz Geerk

Exhibition title: Lotion

Venue: Gerhard Hofland, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Date: October 15 – November 12, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Gerhard Hofland

In collaboration with -TheAmazingPoppingEyes- we are proud to premier the series Lotion by the German Artist Lenz Geerk.
The soles of our feet are strange and miraculous things, and they are rarely uncovered in public. They can evoke disgust or fetishism, and the act of looking at them directly requires us to move into inconvenient and strange positions.
In Lotion Lenz Geerk presents his subjects isolated, appearing undisturbed and unaware of being seen. This way, Geerk draws on the curious relationship between exhibitionism and voyeurism, intimacy and anonymity, bringing out the bottoms of our feet as a metaphor for the operation of self-reflection and self-profiling that appears to dominate contemporary culture.

The impact of the Modernists on contemporary figuration is undeniable. However, as a young artist today, Lenz Geerk is rather interested in using painting as a way of (re)questioning; as an antithesis of a visual culture in which everyone has a camera and is looking for the cliché of beauty and non-stop self-portrayal, while trying to find exception and individuality nonetheless.

The artist draws from a juvenile disorientation, sometimes also moving into ambiguous expression of gender and loneliness, showing us the fascinating shapes of the attempt to self-reflect in body language. Lenz Geerk (1988, CH) lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany. He completed his education at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under the mastership of Siegfried Anzinger and Lucie McKenzie. Gerhard Hofland is proud to present his works to the Dutch audience for the first time, in collaboration with -TheAmazingPoppingEyes-.