“The work of Franziska Klotz is currently in a fascinating junction,” says Christoph Tannert, artistic director of Kunsthaus Bethanien. “Things are evolving. There is a noticeable transitional element that sets the tone of the whole exhibition. This shift has both an existential and an artistical aspect.

Many artists passionately cherish the state of incognito, which hints towards dissociation. Franziska Klotz does not. With her new works, she reacts to her life and art with acute awareness. Those who know how to read Klotz’s paintings will perceive a particular, emotional moment in them, which connects the private inner world with the public environment.

From an artistic point of view, Klotz's annual production in 2019 is more concentrated, stylistically more condensed, and more oriented towards the significance of colour as matter. It includes drawings as well as small to mid-format oil on canvas paintings. More than ever before, Franziska Klotz respects the autonomy of artistic values as the essential factors in the transformation of reality.

Paintings of young people in times of crisis thematise mood swings and the challenges of coming of age.

The highlight of the artistic self-interrogation of Klotz is the painting “Moorbrücke”, a symbolic painting constructed upon brown/white/grey/blue panels in which insecurity and instability constitute the horizon of interpretation in the life of every human being. This painting that points both towards the whence and the whither is a meditative bridge from colour to a transcendent reality. Franziska Klotz only primed the canvas partially, and she playfully places codes in the upper part of the painting with charcoal to lead the viewers into the open and ultimately to leave them to their own devices without easy answers…”

Exhibition FRANZISKA KLOTZ AND PATRICIA AYRES | 24 Jan - 18 April 2020

Source/Text: Galerie Kornfeld / Christoph Tannert Leiter Künstlerhaus Bethanien 

Text: David Elliott 

Franziska Klotz (born 1979 in Dresden) is a painter. For her, painting is not a medium “among many”, not at all; it is the medium in which she puts all her energy, time, heart, and soul into and she expertly explores its potential. Colours, the interaction with them, their effect and materiality are her world (her subject). Her painting is in the most real sense 

of the word a handicraft; she is hands-on, paints with her fingers, palm, she presses, rubs, smears, literally transfers her energy onto her paintings, and they acquire their intensity and allure from her state of mind and gestures. Meanwhile, she loves oil paint, its sensuality and materiality.

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