Lotte Gertz was born in Denmark in 1972 and studied first at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam before attending the Glasgow School of Art. She has lived and worked in Glasgow since graduating from GSA in 2002. Her practice uses drawing, painting, collage and assorted printing techniques to gather a mix of abstracted and identifiable fragments that seem both immediately familiar and yet hard to place.
These images simultaneously suggest and withhold their meaning - recognisable elements such as vases, caps, clouds, breasts, poppies, musical instruments, t-shirts and tents - offer a hint of narrative, but resist easy interpretation. As the writer and art historian Susannah Thompson has written:
“Gertz’s collation of source material is democratic and magpie-like. Canonical high art sits alongside the detritus of advertising, the timeless shored up against the throwaway. This process of selection, while it may often be intuitive and serendipitous, is far from incidental as a way of working – throughout the artist’s work we find the quiet articulation of an intention to flatten hierarchies and occupy a space between binary oppositions in the juxtaposition of the lowly and the elevated, the fusion of art and craft, the value identified in aspects of culture often ignored or marginalised.”
Gertz’s pictures are indicative of a process rooted in thinking through making, made up of components that are gathered, re-worked and assembled over months and sometimes years. They build into images that overlap, diverge and collide, dissolving into one another and into layers of possible meaning. They offer, as the curator Ainslie Roddick has noted, an invitation towards “open and shifting ways of seeing.”