Jorg Lozek "In the Room" Solo Exhibition

Im zimmer - Zwei detail 230x300 cm 2008

Jorg Lozek's "In the Room" solo exhibition was held at the Daniel Templon gallery from May 31st to July 19th. Jorg Lozek (born 1971) is one of the representative painters of contemporary German Neo-Painting. Together with his painter colleagues David Schnell, Tim Eitel, and Matthias Weischer, he helped shape the New Leipzig School wave of German painting. Belonging to a post-East German generation of artists returning to dramatic figurative painting, they question socialist aesthetics through history and architecture.

The characteristic of their painting is the ambiguous reconstruction and deconstruction of image compositions based on historical photographic documents, marked by an unusual literariness and anecdotal quality. Jorg Lozek's dramatic "In the Room" series uses rigorous perspective to create ambiguous interior spaces, constructing and deconstructing arrangements of old furniture, accumulated objects, and the addition of a solitary, helpless figure.

He specifically intensifies the depiction of various objects, especially wallpapers or carpets, mixing oil painting and drawing. The painting exists between semi-drawing, semi-interior design, architecture, and Baroque murals, constituting an absurd and banal setting. Each interior features only one lonely figure presented in an unnatural posture, metaphorizing existential anxiety and helplessness. The painter explains: "A recurring figure, lonely, vaguely concealed among the objects, simultaneously an adult and a child. He must perform a simple action (standing, sitting, lying down) and does not raise any additional questions. His attention is directed around the room. And is completely focused on himself."

The art critic Oliver Kornhoff wrote: "Jorg Lozek's work answers our need for curiosity about painting. His work raises questions of identity creation, disturbed and placeless, the space of the attic and of memory."