Matthew Lutz-Kinoy

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy was born in New York in 1984 and lives and works in Paris. He received a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2007 and completed a residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam in 2010. His multidisciplinary practice brings together painting, performance, installation, ceramics, printmaking, dance, and theatre. Drawing on art history, decorative traditions, and queer cultural references, his work explores the relationships between bodies, images, objects, and architectural space. Lutz-Kinoy is known for large-scale paintings on unstretched canvas that can function as tapestries, curtains, or theatrical backdrops within immersive installations. His exhibition Bolero Bordello was presented at Capitain Petzel in Berlin in 2025, while Heavenly Biches, developed with ceramicist Kazunori Hamana and musician Eiko Ishibashi, took place at Sogetsu Plaza in Tokyo the same year. His practice frequently addresses the "politics of the body" and its relationship to architectural space. By combining historical motifs with contemporary social and performative situations, he examines the "performative nature of the domestic," transforming exhibition spaces into settings for collective and sensory experiences. Throughout his career, Lutz-Kinoy has developed a methodology of "collaborative scenography." He frequently works with dancers, choreographers, musicians, writers, and other artists to activate his installations through performance, movement, and communal gatherings, investigating the "materiality of intimacy." His practice brings historical references—including Rococo painting, ceramic traditions, ballet, and experimental theatre—into dialogue with contemporary queer experience. The result is a "theatre of the everyday," in which paintings and objects operate simultaneously as images, spatial elements, and settings for social choreography. This approach is evident in Filling Station (2023), a project commissioned by The Kitchen and co-presented with Dia Art Foundation. Inspired by the 1938 ballet of the same name, it comprised three dance performances staged at a Manhattan petrol station and Dia Beacon, alongside an exhibition of paintings, archival materials, audiovisual elements, and ephemera at The Kitchen at Westbeth. In 2016, Lutz-Kinoy and Tobias Madison also presented the collaborative performance project Rotting Wood, the Dripping Word: Shūji Terayama’s Kegawa no Marii as a Sunday Sessions commission at MoMA PS1. Lutz-Kinoy has presented solo and collaborative projects at institutions including Le Consortium in Dijon, the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, the Centre d’édition contemporaine in Geneva, Vleeshal in Middelburg, The Kitchen and Dia Beacon in New York, and MoMA PS1. His work has also appeared in international group exhibitions and performance programmes at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. His practice continues to explore how painting, performance, decorative art, gender, and social space can converge within fluid and collaborative environments.