In the 11th installment of our Berliner Luft  program, Dittrich & Schlechtriem present the work of the New York-based artist Robert Lazzarini, on view Monday, July 27th through Saturday, August 1st, from 11 AM to 6 PM. At the entry of the gallery space hang the four square-format, silk-screen on canvas Break-in paintings of 2018, depicting compositions of violated home exteriors.

A break-in, at its core, expresses the desperation of the offender. The series revisits characteristic themes in Lazzarini’s oeuvre, including the myth of violence in American culture. It also points to an economic divide and the temporal nature of ownership. At the intersection of the body, the home, violence, and the criminal act, it conveys a picture of America as a place of vulnerability and social unrest. Lazzarini combines these appropriated images of breaking and entering with an optical screen door patterning that varies in scale and suggests to the viewer various physical proximities. That physicality reflects in turn the bodily act of the break-in, the body’s entry into the home, and the body of the viewer as they navigate a changing image.

Lazzarini conjures the relationship between a violation of the home and both physical and cognitive exposures. In his book The Poetics of Space  the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard positions the house as a place of intimacy and memory. He also establishes relationships between the inside and the outside. The forced entry in these images is as much of a breach of one’s psychological habitat as it is of the domicile."