Lotti van der Gaag 1923-1999

Lotti van der Gaag. Charcoal 1952. 48x64cm

Lotti van der Gaag was a sculptor and painter. At the insistence of her then partner, the painter Bram Bogart, she started sculpting in the 1940s and took classes at the Royal Academy of Art and the Free Academy in The Hague. In 1950 she left for Paris and through Simon Vinkenoog came into contact with members of the Cobra movement, including Karel Appel and Corneille, with whom she shared a studio there. The latter, however, objected to her joining the movement. Van der Gaag therefore never took part in a joint exhibition, but was strongly influenced in her work, especially when it came to her fantasy figures. In 1951 she took classes in the studio of Ossip Zadkine. A year later her work was shown in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In the 1950s and 1960s, images of her were placed in various cities, such as De Gek in Amstelveen (1951), The Thinker in Utrecht (1955), Phantom in Nijmegen (1964) and Birds and Fishes in Rotterdam (1965). Her image Zonstraketsel (1957) was shown in 2011 on ARTZUID. It is a work from a series of more than a hundred imaginary beings. In 1958 she received the Jacob Maris Prize. From 1974 Lotti van der Gaag started painting; fantasy figures continued to play a leading role in these works. In 1994 she was mentioned in a catalog of the Stedelijk Museum as a member of the "Experimental Group in Holland"; something that was firmly denied by Corneille and others. Lotti van der Gaag died in 1999.