Dirk von Lotzow - detectives

Dirk von Lotzow - detectives

Criminal Verlag, Berlin 2026, 155 pages, hardcover Description

After dropping out of studying art history, he ends upTocotronic-Singer Dirk von Lowtzow in Hamburg in 1993 and sees for the first time in the Hamburger Kunstverein what was then and now called “contemporary art” and was not known from Freiburg. The exhibition was called “Backstage” – “I only knew it from punk clubs” – and was intended as a look behind the scenes and at the same time as an overview of “institutional criticism” and “contextual art”. Many of the positions shown corresponded to the practice that Tocotronic had just begun.
Five years later he met Isabelle Graw, author and editor of, in CologneTexts about art, and after an evening at the bar he is hired as an art critic for the magazine.
The volume of essays brings together (almost) all of the contributions that Dirk von Lowtzow wrote for texts on art and for catalogs between 1999 and 2019: starting with a visit to an exhibition at Sigmar Polke in the Hamburger Kunsthalle and ending with unanswered questions to the writer Leïla Slimani. There is also a rarely played mini-drama.