Lutz’s wandering eye is keen to the satirical, the sexual and the absurd, found in objects both mundane and iconic, from Warhol’s appropriated Brillo boxes, re-appropriated by Lutz for a somber result in cold black stainless steel, to Franz Kline’s fluid action brushstrokes, re-made to reveal disparate body parts lustfully intertwined. With each work, Lutz begins and ends with a simple premise: to extract from a particular source only its most vital information, and with that information find some new way to communicate. For much of his source material Lutz takes familiar symbols and brand names one might find in a magazine or on a billboard, and given the solarized, monochromatic effect that’s inherent in much of Lutz’s work, what he chooses to extract can appear to some a harsh, if not apathetic commentary on the very imagery and iconography that feeds off our minds and wallets.

“I like to think this work reveals a sober and real portrait of us as a culture,” says Lutz, “one that is constantly shifting yet has remained largely unchanged.” Indeed, the unambiguous origins of this body of work may inspire some to recall readymades or the cold steel constructions of the early Minimalists. Whatever one’s perspective, the originality, or lack thereof, of abstraction, Pop and other artistic modes is brought into question here, and becomes the crux of Re-Make/Re-Model. By synthesizing what is consumable and what has, in a sense, already been consumed, Lutz’s work evokes a false déjà vu, wherein we recognize the objects at hand, but clearly we have not witnessed these very things before.