Oliver Lanz

Atelier PR17

About

‚Full Moon on the Highway‘ or ‚The Best Pictures Paint Themselves‘
Works from Oliver Lanz   [by Uta Grosenick, 2007]

Oliver Lanz is a fan of the German rock group Can, therefore, he named one of his single exhibitions after their album ‚Future Days‘ The artist is originally from the Rhineland, lives in Berlin, and studied painting at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf and the Berlin University of the Arts. His mostly large-scale acrylic or oil paintings with silver pigments or spray colors are the embodiment of pure physical abstraction. Cutaway.

His spontaneous painting style follows no rules, and has no motives or illusionary spaces. Lanz perceives painting as an adventure, in which he intuitively experiments with color mixtures, color temperatures, and layers of color as if he were explorer on an expedition. All Gates Open.

Nevertheless, his paintings do not originate just out of intuition of creative act in the secluded studio. Soul Desert.

Lanz’s visual creativity feeds off of daily newspapers, art magazines, websites, and record covers, which he expresses in colorful structures and transparent surfaces. Connection.

Classical painting techniques adapt the design principles of analog and digital media. Translucent overlaying color cords create works with intensive charisma and fascinating beauty. Melting Away.

Along with the expansive canvases, Lanz also creates photographs, which he dips in wax or haphazardly paints over with his sweeping brush, and small-sized paintings which appear as outlandish sketches for the large pictures. These works are composed and presented in serial succession. Chain Reaction.

There are also picture sequences that are horizontally and vertically arranged in a pixel block. I Want More.

Lanz installed six colossal paintings next to one another on a virtually wall-filling panel for a group exhibition in the former building of the German newspaper, Neues Deutschland. This provided an eclectic interaction between the individual pieces, automatically putting the viewers in a different visual world. Don’t Say No.

The newer works from Oliver Lanz profess to more direct and, at the same time, more reflective abstract painting. In a time when figurative painting from Germany is widely acclaimed in museums at home and abroad and attracts the highest bidders at art fairs and auctions, Lanz remains true to himself and his art. In The Distance Lies The Future.

[by Peter Coffin, 2002]

Oliver Lanz uses imagery from the surplus of everyday images to create a colorful, poetic ambience within his paintings. He appropriates film-stills, found imagery and computer generated graphics to create rich abstractions that combine mechanical and organic structures. This engenders the work with a dynamic between the figurative and abstracted elements, with each painting presenting itself as an imaginary and spherical universe of sorts across which the artist traverses with his audience.