Based in Düsseldorf, Dietmar Lutz is best known for his large-scale paintings combining his own experiences walking through the streets of a city as urban "flaneur", combined almost subliminally with references to movies or literature. Having spent time in Geneva in summer 2007 Lutz has made a remarkable body of paintings recalling time spent in the city and its environs, and posing questions about the process of painting itself.

The Geneva paintings began as a process of back-to-front assemblage. Having decided to make a major painting of his studio with canvases propped on the wall, rather than simply group together those works that already existed to make the composition, he could take it a step further and construct, as a stage-set, a special group of paintings for the eventual work. The subject of these paintings would be Geneva: a glamorous dream of sunshine and mountains far removed from the cold reality of his studio in Düsseldorf. The end work completed and titled "Atelier", the paintings that started as "props" then become identified as successful paintings in themselves.

The paintings translate a host of quickly chosen images and frequently fall into the clichéd category of "friend posing with cows" or images of the lake as a sublime landscape. Freed of their expectations to be finished "artworks" from the very inception of the work, these paintings emerge as a cacophony of unselfconscious image-making. By presenting a barrage of such images, Lutz questions the hierarchical structures and decisions by which certain images become paintings.

The ubiquity of some of these images question (s??) whether they come from Lutz's own photographs or whether they might instead have been garnered from a mass-produced source such as a holiday catalogue, or a set of bought postcards. The potentially impersonal images then become personal, invested as they are by Lutz's own painterly technique. Shape and form are freely expressed by generous expanses of pure colour, the watered down acrylic paint absorbed into the canvas, referencing the abstract qualities of colour-field painting. At the same time the generic images again undermine the evidence of personal expression, replacing the paintings' psychological depth with a reprographic generic.

Based in Düsseldorf, Germany, Dietmar Lutz was born in 1968 in Ellwangen, Germany. He received his MA at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1995. He has had solo exhibitions with Karyn Lovegrove, Los Angeles, CA (2006/2004), Emily Tsingou Gallery, London (2002/2003/2005) and Taché-Levy Gallery in Brussels (2006/2003) and has been included in group shows at the Bloomberg SPACE, London (2006), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2003), Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen (1999), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (1998). As a member of the collective "hobbypopMUSEUM" he has exhibited at the 1st Athens Biennial (2007), Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel ( 2007), Deste Foundation, Athens (2005), Deitch Projects, New York (2005), Tate Britain, London (2003).

Lutz has work in international private and public collections that include: the Cranford Collection, London; Deutsche Bank, London; François Pinault Foundation, Paris; GAM, Torino; Mont Blanc International, Hamburg. As part of the collective "hobbypopMUSEUM" he also has work in the Margulies Collection, Miami; Saatchi Collection, London; Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany; Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens.