Franziska Klotz

Inspired by her observations, thoughts, and feelings, Berlin painter Franziska Klotz distills contemporary history paintings from today’s flood of media images, interrogating the motif, confronting existential questions, and exploring the means of painting itself. Her latest works, which premiered at Galerie Kornfeld on January 15, 2022, probe the encounter between self and collective with a focus on the individual’s social, physical, and psychological vulnerability.

Showing crowds at demonstrations, one group of paintings is thematically based on current political and social events and filtered through a reading of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Demonstrators, police, shields, bodies, and individual movements mainly appear as silhouettes, a bright fissure dividing the crowds into two groups. The focus is on themes such as fear, power and powerlessness, the individual and the masses, violence and counter-violence, state and society.

Formally, these works are also based on opposites: dark versus light, cold versus warm, form versus color, the defined versus the amorphous-chaotic. The painting Leviathan II provides an unfiltered view of what is happening on the canvas. In other works, the people and groups are separated from us by a structure reminiscent of a shattering pane of glass. Inserted between us and the image like a transparent membrane, the glass pane shows one or two bullet-like holes. What does that mean for our position? Are we outside? And if so, do we see what’s happening more clearly? Or are we now deprived of clarity?

These images of faceless crowds contrast with depictions of girls, alone and, for the most part, indoors. Despite seeming random, these moments are carefully staged. On the surface, the works are not about crowds, society, or the state, but about girls in adolescence—young individuals moving in the echo chambers of various social media platforms. Each one on their own, yet connected by the same fears, doubts, and insecurities.

The painting What’s wild to you shows a girl in a yellow hoodie, her body retreating into her clothes, contrasted and complemented by a floral armchair. Yet her attentive, piercing gaze demonstrates that she is in charge: “I know exactly that you are looking at me—but on my terms.”

Another painting, Wanda / Pumpkin Girl, shows a girl in the corner of a room, sitting on the floor amidst the remnants of the titular pumpkin, which she raises to her mouth in a sweeping gesture. The image seems to be a sensual staging of excess, a deliberate transgression of boundaries, and features the same defiant gaze. “Pumpkin Girl” is not an oblivious child simply enjoying herself: she knows exactly what she is doing, her gaze seeking both confrontation and reassurance. Not just “Look closely!” but also “Are you really looking?”

The source material for these images are self-dramatizations of young girls in online subcultures. “Despite the apparent differences of such ‘heterotopias’,” the artist says, “the common display of the girls’ vulnerable facades reveals the function of these spaces: they serve as places of escape in which the relationship of the ego to the body and analogously to the social fabric is acted out, and thus also as waiting rooms for entry into the adult world.” Both shy and extroverted, the girls use the seemingly protected virtual space of their group to search for their place in society, testing boundaries and norms—their own as well as those imposed on them by society and the state.

Franziska Klotz (born 1979 in Dresden) received the City of Brühl’s Max Ernst Scholarship and was invited by the Goethe Institute to be resident artist at the Culture Academy Tarabya in Istanbul in 2015 and 2018. Her works have been exhibited internationally, including the 4th International Biennial of Young Art in Moscow (2014), BALAGAN!!! Contemporary Art from the Former Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places at the Brandenburg Gate Foundation in Berlin (2015), the 56th October Salon in Belgrade (2016), and the Fanø Art Museum in Denmark (2017). In 2018, her works were shown at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin; in 2019, she was given a solo exhibition Ölregen at Kulturforum Schorndorf; and in 2021, her works were shown at Studio Bosporus – Festival 10 Jahre Kulturakademie Tarabya at Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin.