Lotte Gertz @ Mary Mary

Lotte Gertz's work has a discreet intensity that would not be out of place in a 1960s gallery. Her playful collage and assemblages are full of referential elaboration and emblematic shifts. Scattered papery shards, nylon threads and the elastic band eyes of a mannered and symbolic face all vie for attention with flat sections of muddied woodcut print and paint. In each of the eight works, endearingly flimsy paper attaches modestly to the walls. Openly raw paper edges, often layered on top of one another, empathise with exposed fibre and filament. Jaunty objects add weight to the proceedings, anchoring the work, providing substance and longevity to the ephemeral. Gertz's tensely bold block figures are the stuff of concussed hallucinations, not quite anthropomorphic, not fully abstract, offering the viewer a foothold into her complex visual language. Carefully sewn-on buttons meet tipsy dashes, toying with languid lines, in a unity of distinct elements. The architectural spaces hinted at as cursory lines tend to be unstable, similar to an interior mindscape. Houses and inverted triangular roofs are a topsy-turvy upstairs downstairs predicament. Additions and subtractions in the work fall away line by line, and surface planes assemble briefly. Most of these structures formulate around pivotal moments. A grandfather clock is a dislocated crescendo within a non-existent narrative. The clock's column of accumulated painted lines and cut-out jagged edges overreaches its confines slightly, tipping the balance completely. This flatland could be an awakening or a rehashing of a not so random order. [Danniella Watson]