Soap Bubbles

The works in this ambitious installation address themes of innocence and the loss of it, the sense of self and repetition, pleasure, gay sex and organized religion. The combination of painting techniques and variations of motifs depicted in Lutz-Kinoy’s new body of work is inspired by the stacked painting displays found in churches of the 15th century and later in salon-style hangs in Paris. Structured as a collaged narrative, the installation visually collapses the atrium into a flattened picture plane, while the composition of the paintings is inspired by Jacobo and Domenico Tintoretto’s monumental painting Il Paradiso (ca. 1588). At the top a bearded figure appears between clouds, and below are three panels of sleeping babies painted with industrial silver paint. The figures are duplicated and silkscreened into the surface, forming a visual maze through which our eyes dance from figure to figure. The atrium is topped with a massive painted velum acting as a faux sky, filtering all natural light in the room.

Working across mediums including sculpture, printmaking, ceramics and painting, Matthew Lutz-Kinoyis known for his large format paintings, often installed like tapestries, wall panels or suspended ceilings that depict intermingling scenes of animals, vegetables, minerals and human bodies. Lutz-Kinoy’s work asserts matters of pleasure, color, intimacy, motion, as fundamental. His paintings look through a history of representation from the rococo to orientalism to abstract expressionism; challenging what constitutes the inside and the outside of the arts, the social and the self.

Curated by Samuel Leuenberger under the theme “How to Grow in Times of Change”