Clemens Krauss: Sediments

Replacing the human figure, Krauss now presents buildings, surfaces, and everyday objects as vessels of temporality, history, and memory. In doing so, he shifts the focus from interpersonal relationships to the corporeality of things, while simultaneously articulating a distance from an anthropocentric perspective.

The artist’s signature thick, impasto application of paint remains central to his practice. Layer by layer, Krauss deposits oil paint onto the canvas, creating relief-like surfaces that evoke geological sedimentation. Like natural deposits, these accumulations preserve traces of time, movement, and material. The painting process itself resembles a psychoanalytic excavation, gradually revealing concealed layers in which meaning emerges only through their superimposition.

Light and shadow activate the sculptural bodies of the paintings, opening shifting perceptual spaces between surface and depth. Luminous traces of color beneath the upper paint layers appear like remnants of earlier states, making the temporal dimension of the image tangible.

The works originate from observations of urban environments. Architecture appears as a sedimented repository of cultural and material processes; limestone, clay, and brick become references to a materiality that seems at once constructed and organically grown. In ›Sediments‹, Krauss consistently extends his investigation of hidden structures, shifting attention from the human figure to the physical presence of things.