Charles Lutz's Price List paintings engage with the abstraction of value transfer within the art market, drawing inspiration from the imagery and content of art auctions and auction catalogs. By repurposing the familiar language of pricing, lot numbers, and auction house vernacular, Lutz creates works that reflect the commodification of art in the contemporary market. These paintings transform the transactional into the visual, blurring the lines between art and commerce. The seemingly cold, numerical structures that populate his compositions mirror the way value is assigned, re-assigned, and inflated in auction houses, where prestige and perception often dictate price over intrinsic artistic merit. Through this strategic appropriation, Lutz questions the complex interplay of economic forces in the art world, offering a critique of how market-driven values shape artistic identity. His work becomes a visual commentary on the fragility of perceived worth, highlighting how the art market, much like any financial system, is influenced by trends, power dynamics, and subjective valuation. The Price List series, then, is not just a reflection of market mechanics, but a nuanced exploration of how art is enmeshed in the complex web of capitalism and cultural capital
