En Face

The monograph En Face by William Lutz (born 1949) brings together works from the 1980s onwards. The book provides insights into his wide-ranging body of work, which consists of paintings, drawings, collages, and photographs. The human body stands front and center, often abstracted and rendered in black and white, seemingly in permanent motion. The effect is as if the bodies in this ongoing investigation of the relationship between figure and space work actively against any attempts to define them, much in the same way that Lutz’s inclusion of various artistic approaches in this book works against any reduction of his oeuvre to a single format or subject matter.

The heartbeat of the book is En Face, a set of recent acrylic drawings on paper, playfully combined with various work series. The drawings are accompanied with writings, notes, collages, and photographs of architectures. The texts are excerpted from Die Unterbrechung (oder Das Unbehagen des Schweifenden) (The Interruption, or: the Anxiety of Wandering), a series of observations of a flaneur in both urban space and art history, and they are published here for the first time. Similar to a stream of consciousness, they unfold in images, thoughts, and states of being.

Interwoven as a flow of associations, there emerges an exhibition of William Lutz’s work with an astonishingly timeless effect, condensing his oeuvre together while simultaneously opening it up in a range of directions.