Charles Lutz

Charles Lutz is an American Painter born outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1982. Lutz studied Painting and Art History at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, as well as Anatomy at Columbia University, NY. He received a BFA from the Pratt Institute College of Art in 2004. Lutz lives and works between Red Lion, PA, and Brooklyn, NY.

Artist Charles Lutz 2016

Lutz most recently exhibited a series of new sculptures at Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater in Mill Run, PA in 2022. Lutz took inspiration from the home as well as objects once sold at the Kaufmann's Department Store which helped fund the construction of the iconic home.

Since his first solo exhibition in 2007, Lutz's work has been shown in major galleries and institutions throughout the US and abroad including the Andy Warhol Museum Pittsburgh, Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh, Artipelag Museum Stockholm, New Museum New York, Dickinson Gallery New York among others. His work dealing with consumerism and originality has been the subject of major exhibitions and critical acclaim. Lutz's work has even been cited In the Supreme Court case Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith.

Lutz is widely known for his work relating to the Art World, specifically his engagement with concepts of originality through his series of Denied Warhol works, which were submitted to the Warhol Authentication Board to be formally denied, in an act of creative destruction. Lutz's work engages with a long narrative of the ready-made in Contemporary and Modern Art, looking to further the concept through exploring our cultural relationship with originality, consumerism, and consumption.

Lutz's show "Charts, Price Lists, Corrections, and Other Relevant Statements" at the Brooklyn project space Five Myles dealt with ideas of consumption and ego through large-scale paintings based on the auction sales price lists from Christie's and Sotheby's, as well as large-scale photo based works referencing the auction house's own promotional materials dealing with consumption.[1]

The exploration into values and transference continued in his 2013 show "Ends and Means", this time focusing on our collective abstraction of value, looking at the trace of movement of currency and those facilitating such transactions. One of the most iconic paintings from the exhibition being a 12 ft tall monochrome red oil painting of former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, other works consisted of paintings constructed from used currency bank bags and large paintings based on re-transcriptions of robbery notes. The show was reviewed in both Modern Painters and The Wall Street Journal.[2][3]

Later in 2013, Lutz went on to do one of his largest public installations to date. At the 100th Anniversary of Marcel Duchamp's groundbreaking and controversial Armory Show, Lutz was asked by the curator of Armory Focus: USA and former Director of The Andy Warhol Museum, Eric Shiner to create a site-specific installation representing the US. The installation "Babel" (based on Pieter Bruegel's famous painting) consisted of 1500 cardboard replicas of Warhol's Brillo Box (Stockholm Type) stacked 20 ft tall. All 1500 boxes were then given to the public freely, debasing the Brillo Box as an art commodity by removing its value, in addition to debasing its willing consumers.[4][5]