Urs Lüthi on show at Otto Gallery in Bologna with Aus der Serie der grossen Gefühle

After Nothing to Hide in 2010 and Art is the Better Life in 2016, OTTO Gallery in Bologna presents the third solo exhibition of Swiss artist Urs Lüthi (Kriens, 1947) entitled Aus der Serie der grossen Gefühle (From the Series of Great Feelings) from January 18 to April 10, 2020.

If the previous exhibitions focused on Lüthi’s photography, sculpture, installations, and video performances, Aus der Serie der grossen Gefühle presents us with the artist’s pictorial production of the 1980s. In the large figurative canvases painted in acrylic and placed in the gallery’s exhibition rooms in dialogue with different cycles of sculptural self-portraits, female and male bodies stand out superimposed on each other, now stylistically declined as photo-realistic representations of almost classical nudes, now as comic figures resembling comic strips or amused performances close to the elementary nature of graffiti art.

It is a deliberately trivializing and ironic painting, indifferent to technicalities and primary aesthetic qualities, that addresses the existential, sense-making relationship between the individual and his identity, the body and its double; but above all, the pictorial medium in Urs Lüthi seems deputed to give form and flesh to feelings and emotions: the emotional universes related to love and death and the most unmentionable and profound universal human drives are represented in this series of pictorial self-portraits through a strategy of mirroring where the artist’s image becomes the metaphor through which the human condition shows itself. At the same time, the pictorial investigation in the Swiss artist also takes the form of decorative scores carried out with crisp, impersonal painting: compositions of abstract color fields create sequences of geometric patterns that commend the painting of bodies, giving rise to seductive diptychs.

Born in Kriens(Lucerne, Switzerland) in 1947, Urs Lüthi lives and works in Munich. His works have been exhibited in institutions such as Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne (Switzerland), Kunsthalle Göppingen(Germany), Viafarini DOCVA in Milan, Fondazione Brodbeck in Catania and MACRO in Rome, to name a few. In 2001 he represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale.

For all information you can visit OTTO Gallery’s official website.

Pictured: a work by Urs Lüthi

Urs Lüthi on show at Otto Gallery in Bologna with Aus der Serie der grossen Gefühle

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