About

Michael Alan Lauterbach (born 1954) 

is a vagabond artist whose turbulent, expressionist paintings and gnarly assemblages reflect a man trying to make peace with a pained and fractured psyche.

Although he possesses three academic degrees, Lauterbach’s work is more in line with what curators and historians traditionally call outsider art. His images are spooky and repetitive. They privilege emotion over intellect. And he has worked his whole life in the shadows, hidden from the commercial and institutional art world.

Lauterbach describes his studio process as a ritual to invoke a spiritual presence. You can see its trace in the work’s instinctual patterns and gestures. Many paintings depict a web of haunted faces with hideous, yawning mouths intuitively spread across the picture plane. In the earliest ones a clearly rendered demon horde in Afro-Caribbean colors stares down the viewer. In later works the faces are harder to find; they struggle to emerge from a swamp of fat abstract brushstrokes knit together like a crazy quilt in turquoise, grays and pinks. Lauterbach’s paintings find the razor’s edge of beauty and the grotesque.

The mixed-media assemblages often include animal bones. They have a real witch-crafty presence. Lauterbach named this quality Zenvoodoo. The name captures his desire to conjure up a place of calm. This can be seen most clearly in a series of large mixed-media canvases that he slashed with a razor. Made in the late 1990s, he created them just before he began to cut into his own flesh. In some of the works, the gashes are crudely sutured with found string and lace. Those feel like a healing, the transformation of a harrowing compulsion into a moment of high aesthetics. In others, the cuts remain open like untreated wounds. Many of Lauterbach’s objects stand in for the artist’s ravaged self.

Lauterbach grew up in a suburb outside of Chicago, where he was sexually abused by his mother and beaten by his alcoholic father. He developed violent tendencies at a very young age, and experimented with drugs during a closeted gay adolescence. His life took a positive turn at age 21 when he found his way to Iran and fell in love with a young soldier. He began smoking heroin and immersed himself in the poetic culture there. He was introduced to Persian block printing, an intuitive method of stamping images from the center outwards. The age-old tradition became an important influence on the de-centered map-like surfaces of his paintings and drawings. During his time there, Lauterbach managed to get into his first exhibition. The show at the Golden Key Disco in Isfahan was a high point. But the respite from a life of misery would be brief. Homosexuality in Iran was illegal then as it is now. When the love affair was discovered Lauterbach was arrested and deported, losing all his paintings. This was the first of several such forfeitures. The 1979 revolution came shortly after and with it a violent Islamic crackdown and his lover’s execution.

Throughout the 80s and early 90s Lauterbach was able to manage his drug habit and suicidal depression well enough to earn his degrees: a BS in Middle Eastern and Southwest Asian studies at the University of Minnesota, a BA in art from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in painting and sculpture from the University of Arizona. During that time he went back and forth to the middle east smoking heroin with ex-patriots in Saudi Arabia and getting the boot from the authorities in Israel/Palestine.

At the University of Minnesota Lauterbach painted under the tutelage of Herman Rowan. He discovered the work of Ludwig Kirchner, and he had his one and only solo exhibition at the student gallery. In Arizona Lauterbach painted with Robert Colescott, Harmony Hammond, Bailey Duggan and Alfred Quiroz. He got along with the faculty but he remembers being misunderstood and left alone to sort out his own studio practice. “The instructors liked my work but they didn’t know what to make of it,” said Lauterbach in an interview. “They were at a loss for words.” So too were the other students. Lauterbach remembers being envied for the extra parenting he received from Quiroz and other empathetic faculty members. But the students gave him a wide berth because of his violent and unpredictable behavior in the studio. He would often smash things against the wall and scare people. He was not allowed to teach his own classes.

After moving to San Francisco in 1993, Lauterbach tried to kill himself by overdosing on prescription drugs. After seven days in a coma, he was forced to return with his sisters to the midwest. For the next five years he lived in Minneapolis and received disability payments. This allowed him to paint full time. Shielded from the pressures of galleries and dealers, he continued to make his eerie, mural-size paintings. He staples these directly to the wall or onto crude wood stretchers like the tribal objects he grew up studying in books handed down from an aunt.

In 1998 Lauterbach injured his back in a bicycle accident on an icy street, compounding his medical woes. Assured of continued disability payments, he moved back to San Francisco. He briefly shared a studio in Oakland with the painter Jerry Frost; then established one in a Victorian flat in The City. The large paintings of haunted faces became emptier and veered toward the non-objective. The assemblages evolved to feature colorful pieces of packaging and dangling loops of dime store pearls. A large cartoon rat with a vicious smile cropped up either to taunt the artist or to stand in for him and menace the viewer. Aside from a single open studio event in Oakland, one of the rare times the public would get to see Lauterbach’s work, he had zero contact with the Bay Area art establishment. A large group of paintings from this period were stolen.

Lauterbach’s health continued to decline. In 2012 he lost his left leg through a series of medical mishaps and became confined to a wheelchair. Forced to abandon work on a large scale, he turned to painting with encaustics, an ancient method using hot wax and pigment. The result is a rich body of lurid landscapes, rough-hewn abstractions, and lumpy constructions unlike anything he had made before. Dense accumulations of wax and color carry these beyond painting and into sculpture. Taken to their extreme they resemble lumpy little golems. Unfortunately, three-dimensional works require ample storage, which is expensive in San Francisco. Unable to pay the back rent on his warehouse space, Lauterbach lost possession of his entire body of work.

Lauterbach’s early paintings are often compared to those of Jean Michel Basquiat for their expressive energy and crudely drawn figures. The later compositions invoke Willem DeKooning’s fragmented abstractions with figurative shards from the 1940s like Attic and Excavation. But in most other ways Lauterbach is out of step with art history and the thought-based strategies mainstream painters use today. He doesn’t employ photography or digital technology in his work. His materials are as old as art itself. Lauterbach is on the very bottom rung of the social ladder in America. He is completely alienated from his own culture, one step away from medical catastrophe and homelessness. He identifies more with the tangible spirituality found in Islamic daily life than with American consumer culture. His emotional links are to the ancient world. And like a sorcerer from Middle Eastern myth, he has spent his life trying to bring objects to life with an improvised ceremony of magical incantations.