Lutz Driessen is a German artist born in Kleve in 1976, who currently lives and works in Cologne. His training includes studies at the HK-Arnhem in the Netherlands and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he studied under the renowned artist Albert Oehlen.
Driessen’s work, primarily focused on painting and drawing, engages deeply with the potential of the pictorial space. His style recalibrates modernism with a humanist-cartoonesque touch, often featuring fragmented or contorted human or Animal figures in Romanesque settings and
Mannerist postures.
He is fascinated by the tension between sacred and profane imagery, drawing inspiration from historical painters like Matthias Grünewald and combining this with bold colourful gestures one finds in the works of the Chicago Imagists. Driessen’s paintings explore existential and ethical questions, often examining the precarity of the body and the forces it withstands. He employs a reduced vocabulary of simple shapes, strong colors, and emphasized lines, using techniques like palimpsest (layering and partially erasing) to suggest movement and potential within the image.
Morgan Betz is a Dutch-American visual artist, born in Amsterdam in 1974, who works across painting, sculpture, and installation. Educated at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and De Ateliers in the Netherlands, he currently lives and works in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Japan.
Betz’s artistic practice is characterized by a playful yet provocative exploration of the tension between reality and fiction, and the dynamic relationship between physical and mental space. He often uses recognizable, everyday images—like fish, garden fences, or fragments of pop culture (such as Dragonball Z or Elvis)—and reconfigures them into complex, layered narratives. His finished works are a reservoir of images, fragments, and quotations that challenge the viewer’s perceptions.
He is known for a deliberately subversive approach, using bright, highly saturated colors and combining painting with materials like paper maché or oil stick. His method often involves building up and partially deconstructing collected materials and images to create an open narrative line, often referencing themes of revolution, utopia, transience, and decay.
For the exhibition Ketchup, Morgan Betz received support from Fonds Kwadraat.
