Exhibition review published in ArtReview (London), no. 25, September 2008, p. 151.
“Im Zimmer” (‘in the room’) is a collection of recent figurative paintings by German artist Jörg Lozek (born Chemnitz, East Germany, 1971), one of the ascending and most promising figures of the ‘New Leipzig School’. The ensemble shown at Daniel Templon, realized between 2007 and 2008, completes and remarkably deepens an ongoing series that the artist initiated early in this decade. Depicting a lone and impersonal male character in cluttered and confined interiors, with an impeccable, almost graphic style, the thirteen paintings that constitute the show strongly inspire within the viewer a shrinking sensation, as pictorial as it is metaphorical.
This shrinking effect is achieved by the combination of several pictorial factors. First, the wide perspective that the artist meticulously applies to his architectural constructions vertiginously narrows the depth of the rooms. Side walls, floors and ceilings rush into the back walls that shut away the perspective of every painting and confine the scenes harshly. The decrepit aspect of the crumbling walls increases this effect, or movement, of contraction. In Verwandlung (Im Zimmer, Vier) (2008 – ‘transformation’), the wallpaper of the back wall peels off in a crawling and downward gesture. Second, the rooms are overfilled with furniture (beds, tables, chairs, cabinets), accessories and ornaments. Clutter, neglect, and some kind of desolation, add up to claustrophobia. For example, in Das Warten, Drei (Im Zimmer) (2008 – ‘waiting’), many frames, clothes and hunting trophies hang on the walls, already over-decorated with densely ornate, antique wallpaper. Each texture has been rendered with so many details that the entire space seems airless. In some paintings, like Ort (2008 – ‘place’), the back walls are opened with windows. But even these, half-obstructed by thick curtains or heavy veils, strongly isolate the rooms, as they don’t suggest any horizon to be unfolded behind. Rather, everything seems somehow devoted to the literal manifestation of an interior or interiority: a recess.
Finally, the male character, who inhabits these rooms, is himself a pretext, a means of pointing towards the manifestation of interiority — either because he is systematically looking away from the viewers, lost in his thoughts, or perhaps in avoidance, or because he is unconscious, asleep (Der Schlafende, 2008 – ‘the sleeper’) or drunk (Wenn alles sich dreht, 2008 – ‘when everything is spinning’). Huddling up on a bed or standing against a wall, his body suffers the same contradictions operating within the rooms. In the one position, he adumbrates a rotten disorder. In the other position, he sustains the movement of the perspective as his gaze plunges towards the back wall or the floor. In any case, the character, as much as the rooms he inhabits, seems to be a pretext for the painter to give a form to a recess, to embody the feeling of confinement in all its nauseating and comforting complexity.
If one might interpret this in the recent history of East German deprivation, one might just as well observe that Jörg Lozek’s paintings are pictorially self-referential and escape from any literal historical burden.