LORIENNE LOTZ
(b. 1954 Bulawayo, Zimbabwe)

Born in Zimbabwe, Lorienne Lotz currently lives in Cape Town. She completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at Michaelis UCT (2013) and was awarded a Sasol New Signatures Merit Award (2014). Lotz studied in the 1980s under the renowned artist and teacher, Bill Ainslie, at the Johannesburg Art Foundation.

Since 2008, the annual intensive Rosenclaire workshops in Italy and South Africa (run by duo Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky) as well as the Astar process and painting sessions with Lindy Solomon are influences that have been instrumental in forging Lotz’s deeply intuitive material process and awareness of a formal language.

Her work is held in private collections in South Africa and internationally.

ARTIST STATEMENT | A brutal colonial system in what was then Rhodesia, into which I was born and in which I was raised, is now Zimbabwe, a system that has ‘evolved’ into an oligarchic reign of terror and corruption. Profoundly impacting my psyche, my life and my work, I have continued to develop motifs of oppression as the broader context for my work over the past years.

But the political is also personal. By rendering the covert overt, the unconscious conscious, I have been attempting to confront in my work that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within me.

By balancing chance tactics, fine attention, and deep contemplation the physical act of my painting mirrors my interiority; it entails the pacing from palette to canvas, the dictates of the day, a headline that catches my eye, my personal psychological space, as well as the John Cage ''music" of everyday sounds. These factors contribute to the emerging entity of a new painting. This process continues until the canvas develops a 'mind' of its own often resulting in a Herculean struggle or a frenzied dance, where the dictates of the painting arm wrestle the painter (me) and nag the process until a covenant is formed. I have found through this way of working that the content and the process are inextricably linked and synchronistic.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2021 Bated Breath, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2019 Stru’s Bob, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2014 Not Written in Stone, Commune.1, Cape Town, South Africa

         More than a pinch of salt, Youngblood, Cape Town, South Africa

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2022 Things I'd Like To Remember, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

         Winter 2022|23, Everard Read, London, UK

2021 Oasis: 25th Aniversary Group Exhibition, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2020 Still, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2019 Conversations with Irma, UCT Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, South Africa

2017 Cubicle Series, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

         Winter Collection, Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

2016 Rose Korber’s Summer Salon, Provenance Auction House, Cape Town, South Africa

2015 Empire,  Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa

         Hamburg Affordable Art Fair, with Youngblood, Hamburg, Germany

         Art/Out of the Ordinary, AVA, Cape Town, South Africa

2014 Modern Painting, Kalk Bay Modern, Cape Town, South Africa

         Turbine Art Fair, Johannesburg, South Africa

2013 My Mother’s Garden, Arts on Main, Johannesburg, South Africa

2012 Domestic Departures, Kalk Bay Modern, Cape Town, South Africa