Estrid Lutz – Should I Resist

19 April – 14 June 2018 Opening Saturday 19th May from 6–9pm

Jelato Love is honoured to present the first solo exhibition of Estrid Lutz, a French artist born 1989 in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), who currently lives in Marseille and Mexico.

The exhibition title, ‘Should I Resist’, could be interpreted in many ways, there are many things to consider resisting. New sculptures and wall works in the exhibition are constructed from a range of high-tech, resistant and lightweight materials including Kevlar, aluminium honeycomb, fibreglass, carbon fibres and epoxy resin. 

These toxic materials, commonly used in the construction of boats, automobiles, satellites, and other vehicles or large-scale communication devices, are tested by Lutz in an intuitive, aggressive and deconstructive process that exposes the resistance of these fibres in an engaged human-technological relationship.

Dramatic compositions of fragmented images include the organic, for example, a reptile, juxtaposed with manufactured, technological products or environments, such as a data center. Forms of violence, from suffering and war, witnessed onscreen, destruction of buildings, the feeling of missing someone, or being lonely, resonate throughout the work in both image and physical form.

Physically, her sculptures resemble futuristic garments that have served as protection against a nuclear bomb, they shell vacant bosoms and buttocks. A primal form of protection and enhancement, clothes serve as our immediate contact with innovation, as well as an expression of our socio-economic realities, constructed and seen through a screen or not. 

Lutz’s work speaks to the current age, the Anthropocene, where science and technology have thoroughly affected the climate and natural environment, especially where it concerns or effects organisms, the cellular, bacterial, plant, animal, and human life. But it is how the emotional human body and mind are altered in a physically disconnected, yet globally conscious time, that is at the core of Lutz’s work.