dying

Lutz Driessen

Info: In his recent paintings of the human figure, portrayed in Romanesque spaces and Mannerist postures, Lutz Driessen recalibrates Modernism with a humanist-cartoonesque touch. Visual elements refer to icons and cartoons: the sacred and the profane. Through their appearance, a weird combination of the solemn and the raucous, his works evoke serious topics: the precarity of the body, the forces that it must abide, and the relief of the human condition by tenderness. Is Driessen an untimely artist? His paintings promt important ethical questions. Avoiding the main stream, he seeks new connections to painting traditions, even if this means that he must go underground. Fine art has been part of countercultures; the 16th century artist Grünewald – admired by Driessen – continued the earnest style of late medieval Central European art in his paintings, ignoring the art of his time: Renaissance classicism. Driessen’s works portray a contorted human figure. (…)