Jewel

I love you, crazy city. New York is filthy, crusty, run-down, covered in layers of thick paint and rat urine, painted over roaches in tenement housing. There is a city inside of your city. Search that city. There is a jewel in the mountain of your body. Look for the mine of that jewel. Oh, New York, passing search inside if you can, not outside.

Life performance: Stages are paintings, and these works made on the floor are a capture device that parallels video and photography, spills and sprays, resists, saturates, absorbs. I am a series of shapes; the five chakras of boroughs. A body composite, the arm and organ, hair, genital, and finger, all of it simultaneously articulating towards expression, as does the dancer, its parts holistically forming language through the division and articulation of space.  

I don’t find it entirely a coincidence that my obsession with François Boucher’s Rococo depictions of preschoolers performing adult creative-industry tasks, relates directly to my childhood observations of Keith Haring’s radiant baby tag ornamenting the architecture of NY. Motifs in a constant state of shuffling through time and material and are perpetually renewed. 

An architectural flip book speeds past our vision and shows us a chaos of images, perverted of their meaning through repetition and randomization. Translated into paintings, forms appear in abundance, and the artist’s own exuberance and limitless potential expose and make vulnerable one’s own energy and expression. Automatisms owned by no-body gesticulating themselves into the 1970s onto a horizon splattered in Ab-Ex imagery. Is the violence of assimilating expression what constitutes language?

I wouldn’t be surprised that all the chloride and aluminum in your water supply heavily developed and altered my outcome.  I am a North American export, fed back into the system through my Brazilian-born gallery Mendes Wood DM. New York is a Nathen’s hot dog, and it reminds me of a bodega banana, the Chrysler building on shifting unstable ground rentals on top of rentals and on the street, New York’s ubiquitous logo that plays itself over every surface, bank cards T-shirt watered-down black coffee mug keychains, tossed into meaning, characters like coins in an I Ching exercise. 

No War

– Matthew Lutz-Kinoy

Mendes Wood DM is pleased to announce Jewel, an exhibition of new work by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy. Lutz-Kinoy presents a suite of large-scale paintings and an immersive installation of prints and sound, all in symphonic homage to New York City. His practice is characterized by ethereal and delicate compositions, often reminiscent of watercolors, though created through layers of diluted acrylic paint and stencils. His works frequently depict intimate scenes of lovers, floral motifs, and Rococo-inspired flourishes.

Lutz-Kinoy traces his artistic lineage back to influential New York figures such as Keith Haring, Alvin Baltrop, and Jonathan Larson, to name a few. For Jewel, Lutz-Kinoy reimagines Keith Haring’s babies as Rococo angels, silhouettes of human bodies draw us back to Rodin at the Brooklyn Museum, and Jean Cocteau’s drawings inhabit lustrous sidewalk vignettes. Floral transparencies are at once reminiscent of Max Ernst and New York’s industrial decoration.  These exchanges allow for a multitude of semiological possibilities. 

In the lower-level gallery, visitors step into an immersive installation featuring mobiles, record players, and densely patterned floors and walls. The mural unfolds in layers of New York memorabilia, stamped with iconic imagery like Milton Glaser’s  “I Love NY” logo, Nathan’s hot dogs, and subway tokens, forming a vibrant, tangled tapestry of the artist’s youth. The foam stamps used to create the patterns reappear in the upper galleries as bench cushions. Across the space, three record players are activated in sequence, creating a hypnotic, spiraling effect as the music unfolds – not as isolated albums but as a unified soundscape. Among them is “Shades Of... Anthology” by Gray, the 1979 industrial-sound band founded by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Michael Homan, infusing an auditory layer into the immersive, layered cacophony.  

Jewel offers varied media access points, engaging viewers in a complex negotiation of embodiment, repetition, biography, iconophilia, and heritage. Last spring, Lutz-Kinoy returned to New York with a performance staged across venues – the Kitchen, Dia Beacon, and a gas station on 8th Avenue – in homage to Lincoln Kirstein’s 1937 ballet Filling Station. Large-scale paintings served as backdrops, embodying the very gestures Lutz-Kinoy employs in their creation.  Now recontextualized within the gallery space, new works echo the movements and phantasmagorical presences of past performances. Through this cyclical return and repetition, Lutz-Kinoy dissects and reclaims aspects of his identity, engaging with the cultural legacies he now embodies and interrogates.

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy (b. 1984, New York, USA) lives and works in Paris. 

Lutz-Kinoy’s solo shows have taken place at The Kitchen, New York, USA (2023); Cranford Collection, London, UK (2022);  Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brazil (2022); Museum Frieder Burda | Salon Berlin, Berlin, Germany (2021); Mendes Wood DM, Brussels, Belgium (2019); Mendes Wood DM, New York, USA (2019); Vleeshal, Middelburg, Netherlands (2018); Le Centre d’édition Contemporaine, Geneva, Switzerland (2018); Le Consortium, Dijon (2018); Indipendenza, Rome, Italy (2018); and MoMA PS1, New York, USA (2016).   

His work has been featured in recent group exhibitions at Festival of Contemporary Creation, Toulouse, France (2024); Luma Westbau, Zurich, Switzerland (2023); Centre d’édition Contemporaine, Geneva, Switzerland (2023);  Z33, Hasselt, Belgium (2023); Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon (2022); Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía, Córdoba, Spain (2022); Tanzhaus Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland (2022); Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, Paris, France (2021); Geneva Sculpture Biennial, Geneva, Switzerland (2020); Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland (2020); Musée régional d’art Contemporain, Sérigan, France (2019); FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux, France (2019); Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2019); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2018); and Berliner Festspiele, Berlin, Germany (2018).