Loftus Etienne

Loftus William Etienne (* 1951 in Dominica ) is a Dominican collage artist who enjoyed quick and brief fame in the mid-1980s. Due to his inexperienced approach, he is classified as a type brut .

Life

Loftus Etienne was born in 1951 as the son of a carpenter on the Caribbean island of Dominica. In 1958 he moved with his parents to Bradford , England , in West Yorkshire . There he did an apprenticeship as a car mechanic. He also followed his parents in 1971 when they moved to London . In 1973 he moved to his widowed uncle in the New York Bronx , but returned to London in 1975, where he made his way through odd jobs. He worked as a disc jockey in Beirut for half a year in 1977 , after which a period of unsteady work began again in London. To pass the time, he made collages from cut-out pictures, which he linked with colored pencil drawings and hatching . He gladly gave them away. He had come across the technology by chance when a photo fell from his hand onto a poster spread out on the floor. In 1983 the Viennese and Munich art dealer Helmut Klewan got to know him and his works. He was so taken with L'art pour l'art that he brought Etienne to Vienna and organized an exhibition there in 1984. After Etienne had established a good reputation in the Viennese art scene, he received an offer from Arnulf Rainer to enter his class, which Etienne refused. He was more inclined to accept Maria Lassnig's invitation to model her and her students at the Vienna University of Applied Arts . From this he developed an interest in learning painting techniques, so that he later became her student.

Klewan finally found him a studio in Schwabing . With increasing versatility, collaging faded into the background in favor of colored hatching and drawing. The artist experienced the high point of his success at the Cologne art market in 1985 with prices between 1,800 and 6,000 DM . Exhibitions in Munich (1985) and Cologne (1988) underlined the interest in the unusual art. At this time, Loftus Etienne was already longing for his homeland. Nothing is known of any other artistic activities. In 2005, examples of his work were shown again in Altötting and ten years later in an Art Brut exhibition in Halle (Saale).

style

For the Kunstforum International , Etienne's style was a “naive rebirth of surrealism ”, carried out with a tamed and exotic talent for drawing. Their work analysis reads: “The network of relationships that he builds fluctuates between ostensible associations and rather hidden, personal fears and dreams. With a certain naivety he is on the lookout for the beautiful picture and as a true self-taught person uses simple means such as arrows, triangles and parallels to reveal the relationships. In some pictures he already dares to work in small fields with free painting. But he does not give up his clear order, which is always a pile of cubes and surfaces. "

Etienne crouched, as the art magazine Art described the creation of his pictures, on the floor and draped picture snippets on cardboard. He put a ruler and pencil between the glued-on eye-catchers to draw connecting lines. He constructed geometric spaces whose perspectives defied the known dimensions and which he filled "with lavish colored pencil rainbows". The results were rated as follows: “His collages were naive in a straightforward, honest way, without fashionably calculated infantilisms . They were exotic, but not obtrusively folkloric. Full of innocence, the man from Dominica combined the venerable culture he found with sunny colored pencil hatching to create mysterious compositions. "

To viewers, the arrangements of photos and attachments sometimes appear as “true stage sets ”.

Solo and partner exhibitions

• 1984: Loftus Etienne (Galerie Klewan, Vienna)
• 1985: Works on cardboard (Klewan Gallery, Munich)
• 1987: Young Art in Esslingen (Bahnwärterhaus, Gallery of the City of Esslingen am Neckar) (together with Hermann Nitsch )
• 1988: Rainer revisions (Munich, Galerie Klewan) (together with Arnulf Rainer )
• 1988: Loftus Etienne (Galerie Susanne Zander / Delmes & Zander, Cologne)
• 2005: Loftus Etienne (Altötting, City Gallery)

Catalogs and art portfolios

• 1985: Loftus Etienne. Working on cardboard. Catalog for the exhibition in the Klewan Gallery, Munich . with texts by Attersee, Otto Breicha and Hermann Nitsch. Galerie Klewan, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-930127-12-1 .
• 1986: Young Art in Esslingen 1987. Loftus Etienne, Elisabeth Minke, Arcangelo, Anita Wahl, Tamás Trombitás, Marc Desgrandchamps . Bahnwärterhaus - Gallery of the City of Esslingen, Esslingen 1986 (art portfolio).
• 1987: Loftus Etienne. Rainer revisions . with a text by Arnulf Rainer. Galerie Klewan, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-930127-15-6 .
• 1987: Loftus Etienne. Young art in Esslingen . Bahnwärterhaus - Gallery of the City of Esslingen, Esslingen 1987.
• 1987: Andrew Graham Dixon: Loftus Etienne. April 9 – May 15, 1987 . Fischer Fine Art, London 1987.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Loftus Etienne. In: yale.edu/Yale Center for British Art. Accessed August 4, 2016 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Hanne Weskott: Loftus William Etienne. Klewan Gallery, Munich. December 5, 1985– February 1, 1986 . In: Kunstforum International . The current magazine for all areas of the visual arts. 83, March, April, May 86th Kunstforum International, Cologne March 1986, p. 284-285 .
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Jörg Uwe Albig: The Caribbean Comet . In: Art . The art magazine. Gruner + Jahr, Hamburg April 1986, p. 52-57 .
4. ↑ Collage talent from the Caribbean . In: Der Spiegel . No. 51/1985 , December 16, 1985, Szene, p. 141 .
5. ↑ Herbert Hofauer: town hall meeting on Thursday, 10.11.2005 at 19.30 at the Hotel zur Post. Speech by the First Mayor Herbert Hofauer. (PDF; 114.8 kB) In: altoetting.de. November 10, 2005, p. 24 , accessed August 4, 2016 . 
6. ↑ Wahn-Sinn - Jean Dubuffet & Art brut. In the period from January 29 to May 17, 2015, the art association “Talstrasse” eV in Halle (Saale) is dedicating itself to an exhibition with works by the French painter Jean Dubuffet and other well-known artists of Art brut, thanks to the support of the Klewan Collection. (No longer available online.) In: hallelife.de. hallelife.de editors, January 21, 2015, archived from the original on August 20, 2016 ; accessed on August 4, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
7. ↑ Gisela Tanner: Art brut - What actually is art in its “raw state”? In: fantasieundinspiration.blogspot.de. February 4, 2015, accessed August 4, 2016 .