Clemens Krauss
Antidot | Gegengift
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Tereza de Arruda, Jörg-Uwe Neumann |
| Author(s) | Tereza de Arruda, Clemens Krauss, Anna Meinecke, Antje Schunke, Marc Wellmann |
| Design | Studio Hülsenberg Berlin with Niklas Sagebiel |
| Size | 22 x 30 cm |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Pages | 216 |
| Illustrations | 185 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-205-1 |
Clemens Krauss restlessly shuttles across history; his vehicles are painting, video art, sculpture, and performance. Yet Krauss is not “just” an artist, he is also a psychoanalyst and physician. As such, he has first-hand experience of time as the defining factor of existence, daring him to play with it. The bosom of painting is where he feels safest after his hazardous excursions back into his youth and forward into death. Executed in thick paints, his work is physical, material, which is also to say, it exists in time: everything passes away, even the picture. Evanescent, more than anything, are encounters of the sort Krauss stages as part of his psychoanalytical practice; all that remains is the indelible impression they leave. To be indelible, to recall the past, while also “letting happen what has never happened,” as he puts it, these are the ambitions he pursues in his art. Preserved between the covers of the present catalogue and reproduced in thousands of copies, his works now fan out in an instant to circulate for an indeterminate period of time among countless hands, whence they will effortlessly penetrate the barriers of our inner lives to bring us one step closer to transcendence.
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In his extraordinary sculptures, the artist combines a treatment of lacquer practiced for centuries in Japan with an organic language of form.
An exceptional representative and pioneer of the use of lacquer in contemporary art, Tanaka uses the lacquer mostly in polished deep black, sometimes also in intense red, as a multi-layer coating for his large-scale sculptures.
