«Lotti van der Gaag was born as Charlotte van der Gaag on the 18th of December 1923 in The Hague. She was an active sculptor and painter. Lotti was at the Haagse Vrije Academie (The Free Academy of the Hague) with Livinus van de Bundt till 1949 and she almost entirely devoted herself to sculpturing.* Next to sculpturing and painting, she always continued to draft drawings. She never officially became a member of the CoBrA movement, but because of her affiliation with CoBrA’s art she was considered as part of the ‘experimentals’ and she exposed her works beside them. She shared the same atelier building with Karel Appel (1921-2006) and Corneille (1922-2010) in Paris. In 1948, before she even knew the artworks of CoBrA, she began to sculpt in a spontaneous manner strange and often constricting fantasy creatures in clay. Especially her reliefs in terra cotta, with which she made her debut in 1949, and her drawings translated through the utilization of a primitivistic impact of the subjects that surround the CoBrA myth.* The oeuvre of Lotti played a remarkable role in the informal, abstract-expressionistic art from after 1945, because of the emphasis on the raw matter that broke apart from its natural form and the vital expression that was exalted to become a goal on its own. Sometimes strange-like crossings arose between polyp-like forms of plants and animals, that suddenly turned out as birds of prey or forest spirits. She left for Paris at the end of 1950 where she began to make drawings. ...»

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