Clemens Krauss / text
Clemens Krauss works refer to experiences offered and created by the mass media and the ensuing questions of dislocation and mobility – both as cultural and artistic practice – and the individual’s notion of identity. Krauss transfers the situation and appropriation of media perception into a painterly process. As model for the painted bodies he uses the postures of the people whom we meet in the globally circulating picture world. In this sense, the work on a picture, its arrangements and various re-combinations, may also be regarded as a kind of visual sampling, which transforms the media experience and, as staged “social structure”, takes up a stance of its own.
Clemens Krauss combines his works in oil on canvas with text fragments and statements which reflect a variety of discussions about concepts of the body, aesthetics, politics and society in the broadest sense. The focus of the works, however, is the human body, or rather its performative embodiment of social and media experience. Krauss paints his figures not only on canvas, but also directly on the wall, as temporary paintings installations. In a spontaneous and rebellious act of appropriation, his protagonists seize the walls of the museum, the gallery and the booth at the art fair.
Since 2004 Krauss has continuously been working on the series “Das Körperkörper-Problem” (The Bodybody-Problem). The fragmentarily depicted bodies are unfinished, the faces seem distorted, blurry, like an undefined colour mass or cold flesh. The skin as a border between inside and outside is fluid, the extensive and impasto colour application intensifies this expression to the point of abstraction.
Jole Wilcke
based on her text “’Behaviour Settings’ – Appropriation and staging of real and media situations in the works of Clemens Krauss”, Clemens Krauss. Arbeit die wie ein Bild aussieht, ed. Berlinische Galerie and Clemens Krauss (Revolver, 2007).
