‘Mata Hari’ is a prototype for a new series of paintings featuring the unlikely pairing of a canvas and a pinball machine. Under one’s feet is another, rather smaller work that Gottelier made in the Amazon nearly a decade ago, now presented as ‘Remote Control Painting’, while another from the same period has been turned into an ashtray.

Pin-ball’s origins lie in 17th and 18th-century versions of ‘bagatelle’ and ‘billard Japonais’ though the popularity of pin-ball rose in the 1930s, until the Mayor of New York banned the game for over thirty years until the mid 1970s, taking a sledgehammer to confiscated machines before having them dumped in the Hudson River.

With ‘Mata Hari’ set to freeplay, and ‘Remote Control Painting’ fully charged, at heart is the potential to interact and have fun. Gottelier’s presentation continues his sense of irreverence as well as respect for the history of painting, which see’s himself situating his practice particularly at the “fag-end of British abstraction” (Alistair MacKinven, 2013). Luke Gottelier was born 1968 and lives in London.

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