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To celebrate our new publication on Lothar Götz’s joyful public artwork Dance Diagonal, below you’ll find an exclusive extract from an interview between Lothar Götz and Towner curator Noelle Collins included in the book. 

In this section, they chat about Lothar’s music, dance and cartographic influences and the theatrical nature of his monumental painting on Towner’s building.  

Lothar Götz: I think one of the things that I was so fascinated by regarding the Bauhaus [a German art school with an influential approach to design] was that it was very much related to life, and movement affected everything. I love music, along with clubbing and disco dancing. Obviously, I’m a big fan of David Bowie, as well as many funk music groups, and so thought about how exciting it would be to combine music and dance with visual arts.  

But, at that time [when I was a student], it was kind of always seen as, ‘oh, you have to make a serious decision if you want to be a serious abstract painter, you must be very intellectual and all this, you can’t include any thoughts about disco dancing in your work.’  

Then I discovered Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet and thought, ‘Oh my God, this is great — it’s about movement.’ So, Schlemmer became important, and I did quite a few projects relating to his work, for example Pas de Trois. 

When I started doing site-specific works and wall paintings, they didn’t come out of the wall-painting tradition. They were more around dealing with space because another interest of mine was architecture, which from a young age I was obsessed with due to its relationship with space. 

I was also really obsessed with maps. I still love maps, and whenever I’m a bit down, or sometimes when I’m at home, I take out an atlas and look at maps. I found the shapes of cities amazing. If you look at an architect’s plan, you start to visualise what it will turn out like and that I find is the same with a map. 

When I think about a country, I will often look at a map of it and then find three hours later I’m still studying it. Maps have an abstract quality. I think this is the same with dance. I think I just like the quality of a movement. I mean when you raise your arm or raise your leg or you just move, it always creates a shape. 

Noelle Collins: There’s a kind of crossover with topography and cartography where you’re mapping out those undulations of peaks and mountains.

Lothar Götz: Yes, I think when you look at the map, something happens in your brain. I mean if looking at a red field marking a big city, I immediately imagine the city. Brown is often used for desert and green for forest. A map is made up of colours, but they mean something and open something in your mind.  

For me, paintings do this and when I finally ended up studying Fine Art and started painting, I tried to bring in this element. The wall paintings were playing around with space — altering space. Some of the early works only had one colour in a room or were quite minimal. But they were not minimal because I was interested in minimalism, they were minimal because the only thing I wanted to highlight was the space.  

I didn’t want to paint the painting into the space, it was about working with the space and making it so if something enters it becomes a bit like a performance. 

I think these theatrical elements are important for my work when I make decisions. With Towner’s building I always thought that the work was a little bit like dressing up a giant for something, which then stands in the middle of Eastbourne so that, in the end, the whole town of Eastbourne becomes the gallery.  

At Towner the site-specific wall painting is so big, which is great as it means someone can get close to a colour and then doesn’t see anything else. When you pass the colours, I think they’re just big enough that you physically feel the colour and the sequence of them.  

I believe that with certain site-specific works, you can’t just see them with your eyes, but you feel them with your body. You see them from your back. I sometimes say that you must be able to see your work with your knee and your hip and your shoulder. 

Where there isn’t an image, such as with a performance or an interactive work, you often approach a work differently. If the result is an image, you look at something and you use your eyes to interact. Something I found amazing about the reactions from people to the Towner work was that they did somehow prove that most people react quite physically and from different angles to the colour. I think this is mainly possible because it’s not an image. I think that people react to the work in a specific way, or very strongly, because it’s becoming something else. It’s becoming part of the fabric of the town.  

Read more in the book Dance Diagonal. Available to purchase online or at the gallery.

You can also hear more about Lothar’s musical influences by listening to his specially created Spotify playlist.