Lothar Götz announced as Brewers Towner Commission artist

Towner Art Gallery have selected German artist Lothar Götz to transform the exterior walls of the gallery into a large-scale, colourful geometric mural this summer.

Götz, who is based in the UK, was chosen from 60 artists and designers from an open call for the Brewers Towner Commission to create an artwork to mark the 10th anniversary of the gallery’s move from its original home in Eastbourne’s Old Town.

Götz’s work – typically large-scale paintings, drawings and installations that respond to existing architectural structures – has included commissions for South Bank Centre, London (2014) and Leeds Art Gallery (2017). This will be his first major outdoor commission on the south coast, and the first time an artist has been commissioned to create an artwork for Towner’s exterior.

The Brewers Towner Commission will be rendered in the artist’s signature style, using paint supplied by Brewers Decorator Centres, a national company founded and based in Eastbourne. The commission, which coincides with the launch of the £54m redevelopment of Eastbourne’s Devonshire Quarter, will be in situ for one year.

Lothar Götz said:

To paint the entire rendered wall space of Towner Art Gallery offers an amazing canvas, and to realise a painting of that scale in such a prominent public position of Eastbourne really is a kind of dream project for me. The [building’s] façade with its three-dimensional qualities will turn the painting into a kind of giant sculpture addressing the boundaries and crossovers between art and architecture, painting and sculpture and public and institutional spaces. Visible from several prominent viewpoints of the town with a wide range of different audiences, the painting will conceptually sit somewhere between street art and minimalism/abstraction and therefore hopefully offer a range of diverse viewings and readings.

Image: Towner Art Gallery building. Photo: Rob Walker.