William Ludwig Lutgens

Lives and works in Antwerpen, Antwerp, Belgium

Artist statement

My practice centers around scenes, characters, and caricature as tools of social critique. Working with commentary and exaggeration, I question the idea of order and normativity, and propose grotesque alternatives. I grew up in a neoliberal family with a ghost: corporate meeting rooms, suits and ties, a brother I never met but somehow know. Many of my subjects and symbols stem from these biographical anomalies. I look for different modalities of ghosts in my work, mirrored in anecdotes: single scenes that hold up a mirror to our world, its perversions, its absurdities, its hierarchies. My paintings and drawings are populated by playful, alter-ego-like characters, seemingly trapped within rigid systems. They are records of the human ego: its insecurities, its fantasies, its endless performance. These figures form a strange cast of archetypes, such as the achievement-subject clinging to success, the puppet of self-deception, and the Flierefluiter, who resists productivity through idleness and dream. They are, in a way, my fictional family members, the ghosts I take with me. The works inhabit a space where humor and horror collapse into one another, where what wounds us can also make us laugh. My work needs to be somewhat uncomfortable, always. It has always been a tactic of mine to lure the public in with nice-looking things, only to reveal or hide tougher subjects about the perversities and realities of our world. My performances and films take these characters out of the...

Artwork