Meet Loretta Lux – Wilshire Detroit

[I’m..] “…suffering under the ugliness of this world..” – Loretta Lux

Meet German artist Loretta Lux. Her aesthetic of unsettling-vertigo-inducing photos of children can take months to create.
Loretta-Lux-Self-Portrait-The-Hush-1999

Loretta Lux’s early influence:

“My grandparents took me to museums and galleries in Dresden where we looked at Old Masters together, — I had reproductions of Velázquez’s Infanta Margarita and Maria Theresa, as well as a sketch by Rubens of his small son hanging in my room. I was also fascinated by the work of Caspar David Friedrich and the way he depicted the unfulfilled human longing to become one with nature..”

Kristin M. Jones – Fieze Magazine:

“Lux concocts these smooth, faintly toxic confections by digitally combining and altering photographs of her friends’ children with shots of various locations and her own painted backgrounds. To a certain extent these static and highly formal compositions reflect her enthusiasm for Old Master paintings, magically echoing the simplest and most stylized single-figure Renaissance images, colouring them with Tiepolo ceruleans or the turquoise and pinks of frescoes. She cites as influences Agnolo Bronzino, Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Goya and Philipp Otto Runge. Among these, Runge is perhaps the most obvious source, with his enthusiasm for fairy tales and demented-looking cherubs. Bronzino’s stamp is also evident, since Lux’s kids are all as deathly pale as their poses are mannered; their pallor seems almost at one with the rarefied world they inhabit, as if they are somehow defined by their skin. Could there be a weirder hybrid than that between pencil-box kitsch, Romantic genre painting and the chilly, marmoreal flesh displayed by the court notables, cupids and goddesses depicted in Bronzino’s sleekly fey Mannerist works?

Louise Baring – Telegraph/UK: