PRESS RELEASE
LORIENNE LOTZ: Bated Breath
Jul 7 – Jul 27, 2021
Everard Read Cape Town is pleased to present Lorienne Lotz's latest solo exhibition, Bated Breath, at the gallery.
Our first and last breath bookend our lives.
Yet now the universal sanctity of breath is in jeopardy.
A natural phenomenon, breathing happens so instinctively that most of the time we don’t even notice that we’re doing it. The pandemic, however, has inadvertently drawn our attention to it. A world held to ransom by this virus has given rise to a collective holding of our breath. It also brought us face to face with the devastation of our natural resources, and we are thus losing our breath on a planet in crises.
Political and social deadlocks have manifested in violence that shuts off breathing. To add insult to injury, protesters in support of racial justice in the wake of the ‘I can’t breathe’ George Floyd tragedy were fired on with teargas.
‘Bated breath’ is a breath held in anticipation or trepidation. A hovering. A suspension. An uncertainty.
This body of work attempts to capture the pathos of our current experience by evoking the uncertainty of these times – the conflicted underlying sense that things are not what they seem or should be. There is a painful longing or nostalgia. A staying in place, a looking inwards, and a marking of time. And the quiet dignity of overcoming fear.
Holding our breath may signify waiting, and yet waiting with bated breath signifies the indomitable nature of the human spirit – hope.
Born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, Lorienne Lotz currently lives in Cape Town. She completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Fine Art at Michaelis UCT (2013) and was awarded a Sasol New Signatures Merit Award (2014). Lotz studied in the ‘80s under Bill Ainslie at the Johannesburg Art Foundation. Since 2008, she has attended annual intensive Rosenclaire workshops in Italy and South Africa (run by duo Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky). All these influences have been instrumental in forging Lotz’s deeply intuitive material process with an awareness of a formal language. Her work is held locally and internationally in public and private collections.
*Face masks are required and must be worn at all times when visiting the gallery
