The Mud Room: Itinerant Artists, Folk Spectacles, and Painted Walls is an exhibition by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, developed with visiting collaborators Natsuko Uchino and Kazunori Hamana. Reflecting on the work and positions of artists, artisans, potters, and muralists whose lasting impressions on society have shaped our domestic and public spaces, the exhibition at Amant considers the gallery as a ceramic studio and the studio as a theater—a stage hosting narratives of collaboration, transmission and influence. Developed as a theater-in-the-round, a ceramic workshop sits at the center of Amant’s AZ gallery. Throwing wheels, a kiln, and a working platform anchor the gallery as a site of production, where ceramics are created after hours throughout the run of the exhibition. The pottery studio and its audience are surrounded by four large paintings functioning as backdrops. Within this painted environment—inspired by movements of North American art, specifically post-war muralists and public art movements across New York City—the exhibition brings histories of craft as performance onto the stage.
Lutz-Kinoy traces lineages while registering a wide range of biographical and art-historical reference points: from Aaron Douglas’s 1934 Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) four-panel mural, Aspects of Negro Life, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; to Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish’s monumental mural, The Struggle Against War and Fascism (1934–35), in Morelia, Mexico; to Keith Haring’s public murals executed across schools, hospitals, and cities. Emerging from different historical moments, these artists share a commitment to painting, social space, labor, and collective life. Through his work, Lutz-Kinoy positions content in the divide between public art and studio practice, abstraction and communication, artist and artisan.
The paintings created for The Mud Room represent a broader visual tradition where the histories of muralism and craft frame live studio activity. Painted canvas and translucent muslin channel historical American muralists, while on the central stage, Lutz-Kinoy’s collaboration with Natsuko Uchino and Kazunori Hamana extends this dialogue, drawing on the latter two artists’ practices in agriculture, daily life, local materials, and shared labor. The studio acts as both scenography and architecture, forming a backdrop for the circulation of tools, wet clay, and people. By integrating artist dialogues, culinary gatherings, and theatrical performances, The Mud Room frames ceramics as a form of historical continuity where knowledge is transmitted through the body, through touch, and through making.
Born 1984 in New York, NY
Lives and works in Paris, France
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy works at the intersection of performance, installation, and painting, reclaiming ornament as a charged cultural and political form. His practice challenges the hierarchies that separate decoration from function and artist from artisan. Through scenes, objects, and environments, he transforms the decorative into a structure for collective experience.
Most recently, Lutz-Kinoy presented his work in Heavenly Biches, Sogetsu Plaza, Tokyo (2025). This exhibition took as its theme the historic ballet Les Biches, first performed in 1924. Within Isamu Noguchi’s stone garden Heaven, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s paintings vividly animated the space, alongside a series of ceramic works jointly created by Lutz-Kinoy and artist Kazunori Hamana. In September 2026, Keramikos Carrier Bag, the first large-scale survey of Lutz-Kinoy and Natsuko Uchino’s long-term ceramic project Keramikos will open at the Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands.
Lutz-Kinoy’s solo exhibitions furthermore include Capitain Petzel, Berlin; Mennour, Paris; Mendes Wood DM, New York; The Kitchen and Dia Beacon, New York; Cranford Collection, London; Museum Frieder Burda | Salon Berlin; Vleeshal, Middelburg; Le Consortium, Dijon; and MoMA PS1, New York. His work has also been featured in institutional group exhibitions at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Luma Westbau, Zürich; Z33, Hasselt; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Kunsthalle Zürich; FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux; Sharjah Biennial; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Born 1983 in Kumamoto, Japan
Lives and works between Paris and Belvézet, France
Natsuko Uchino is an interdisciplinary artist with experience in permaculture. Her approach to art is shaped by her time in the countryside as well as by her reinvesting techniques related to artisanal production, subsistence economy, and vernacular culture. Her work is structured by ecological stakes, which play out in the choice of materials, their nature, provenance, transformation, modes of assembly, and similarly in the relations she makes between functional, decorative, sculptural and constructive forms. Natsuko Uchino graduated from Cooper Union, New York in 2007 and from the research program of the Center for Contemporary Art Kitakyushu, Japan in 2012. She has been a professor of artistic education in Sculpture and Ceramics since 2017 at the École Supérieure d'Art et de Design-TALM, Le Mans and is the founding coordinator of the materials-based MFA entitled MAGMA -Master of Arts in Geo-Materials since 2021.
Natsuko Uchino has held solo exhibitions at the Rochechouart Museum, Galerie Allen and the artist-run-space Tonus in Paris, Sorry We’re Closed, Brussels, and at the V8 Plattform für neue Kunst, Karlsruhe. In September 2026, Keramikos Carrier Bag, the first large-scale survey of Uchino and Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s long-term ceramic project Keramikos will open at the Groninger Museum, Groningen, Netherlands. She directed the scenography and, with Sophie Auger Grappin, curated the exhibition I dreamed the taste of crushed bricks at the Center Céramique Contemporaine La Borne et La Box, ENSA Bourges, France. She was artistic advisor for the exhibition Les Flammes, The Age of Ceramics, curated by Anne Dressen, at the Museum of Modern Art of Paris. She has participated in group exhibitions including at Taka Ishii Gallery Tokyo; Sokyo Gallery, Kyoto; Croy Nielsen, Vienna; Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux; the Consortium, Dijon; the Van Gogh foundation, Arles; Museum of Modern Art Warsaw; Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, EVA Biennale, Limerick; Castello di Rivoli, Torino.
Born 1969 in Hyogo, Japan
Lives and works in Chiba, Japan
Kazunori Hamana is an artist who lives and works in Chiba, Japan, with a background in agriculture and environmental studies. Hamana’s practice is grounded in the materials and conditions of his immediate surroundings. Climate, harmony, and cycles of circulation inform both his daily life and his artistic process. While he is best known in the contemporary art world for his ceramic works, Hamana understands ceramics as part of a broader field of making. For him, creative expression also includes cultivating rice, fishing, preparing food for everyday life, and maintaining the local environment through the renovation of old houses in the area. These activities hold equal value within his practice. Together, they emerge from close attention to the rhythms of daily life and the surrounding environment, reflecting a philosophy rooted in elemental, enduring forms of knowledge and care.
His work has been exhibited in public art institutions including at The Warehouse, Dallas, TX (2023); Okura Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan (2023); the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2021); Towada Art Center, Towada, Japan (2017); and Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan (2016).