Matthew Lutz‑Kinoy. Window to the Clouds
Window to The Clouds at Salon Berlin of Museum Frieder Burda is the Paris-based artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s first institutional solo presentation in Germany. Comprised of recent paintings, ceramics and sculptures, the exhibition imagines a series of contemporary land-scapes as painterly reflections that look at – and through – various architectures, historical paintings and current events. These environments act as stages for worlds of shared experience, human presence and touch.
Entering Salon Berlin, visitors pass through an immersive sculpture of pink pompoms and a soft pink carpet that spatialize Lutz-Kinoy’s interest in artistic transformation and spiritual transitions. The pompoms, a pluralistic form, at once connote costuming and flowers while also performing as a filter through which other works can be seen.
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy echoes this thematic generosity in his painting technique, which evokes printmaking. The artist’s additive application of acrylics, his gestural brushwork, and his overlapping, translucent colors offer an exploration of depth, both pictorial and spiritual. In Lombardy Capriccio (2020), a cloud of blue-green landscape is portrayed below a curving, embellished arch alluding to a section of ceiling molding in the artist’s home. The scene quotes Francesco Guardi’s Fantastic Landscape (ca. 1765) in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, an imaginary idyll of classical ruins that was sized to fit into a now absent decorative plaster surround. In other paintings, Lutz-Kinoy removes de- tails from their surroundings in order to resituate them and to look at them anew, such as in Lectures of Burle Marx (2020), a portrait of a wild orchid found on a Rio de Janeiro sidewalk. Plants and flowers are often protagonists in Lutz-Kinoy’s work, appearing as companions to or extensions of the body. In each of these paintings, the frame is an active space where relationships can be recalibrated, transience articulated, and a field defined for the viewer to be absorbed in.
