Franziska Klotz & Patricia Ayres

At the beginning of the year 2020, we are showing new paintings by the Berlin-based painter Franziska Klotz in dialogue with sculptures by the New York-based artist Patricia Ayres.

Franziska Klotz paints landscapes, figures, or structures that she observes in real life. The scrutiny of reality and existential questions of being are just as critical to her as the means of painting per se: composition, colour, form, and individual expression. Patricia Ayres makes sculptures out of fabric and other soft materials that evoke deformed archetypes of femininity. The vulnerability of the body becomes apparent, as does the striving of the soul for unconditional freedom.

“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 artistic 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, connecting 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 toward the significance of colour as matter. It includes drawings as well as small- to mid-format oil paintings on canvas. More than ever before, she respects the autonomy of artistic values as essential factors in the transformation of reality.

Paintings featuring the motif of a broken pane—revolving around the relationship between the internal and the external and thematising a desired breakthrough—demonstrate the translation of real sensual experience of sight, always linked to colour and movement, into the form of painting. The organisation of colour as material and as a medium of energy on the surface of the painting is central to her interest. Colour application is pastose. The artist attains form through colour. In a pictorial offensive, she places splinters of form in modulations from blue-grey-lilac to grey-reed green-yellow. It is an introverted spectrum in which colour is conceived from shape.

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

The depths of human existence are also addressed in the painting Bastei, an unreserved pictorial composition referring to the fact that in Bastei (in Saxon Switzerland) a group of Kurds staged an anti-Erdogan demonstration in October 2019, protesting against the invasion of Rojava (the Democratic Federation of Northern and Eastern Syria) by Turkish troops.

The highlight of Klotz’s artistic self-interrogation is the painting Moorbrücke, a symbolic work constructed from brown, white, grey, and blue panels. Insecurity and instability in human life form its horizon of interpretation. Pointing both toward the whence and the whither, the painting acts as a meditative bridge from colour to a transcendent reality. Klotz primed only parts of the canvas and playfully placed charcoal codes in the upper section, leading viewers into openness and ultimately leaving them without easy answers.

Associative candour also characterises the work of Patricia Ayres. Her amorphous, humanoid sculptures are related to the Venus of Willendorf and thus to prehistoric formulations of femininity, while also referencing the fetish-like dolls of Hans Bellmer. An outer skin of coloured rubber bands, fabric, and yarn—held together by hooks, eyelets, and carabiners—stretches over a construction of cotton wool, foam rubber, and plywood. The small-format works could represent either heads or torsos.

Associations with skin-coloured underwear of the past emerge, recalling corsetry shaping the female body according to mostly male ideals, as well as straitjackets that restrain movement through fixation. The vulnerability of the figures is mirrored in pedestals made of stacked concrete blocks, some of them painted. At the same time, the irrepressible power of Ayres’ sculptures is evident—their unquenchable urge to break free and to tear bonds apart, liberating not only the body but also the mind.

Franziska Klotz was awarded the Max Ernst Scholarship of the City of Brühl and worked for more than six months as a fellow of the German Cultural Academy Tarabya in Istanbul at the invitation of the Goethe Institute in 2015 and 2018. Her works have been exhibited worldwide, including at the 4th International Biennale for Young Art in Moscow (2014), the 56th October Salon in Belgrade (2016), and the Fanø Art Museum in Denmark (2017). In 2019, the Cultural Forum Schorndorf dedicated the exhibition Ölregen to her.

After completing her fine arts studies at Brooklyn College (BFA) and Hunter College (MFA), both part of the City University of New York, Patricia Ayres graduated from the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture as a master student in 2019. Her works were shown in 2019, among others, in the exhibition Entering a Song at Koenig & Clinton in Brooklyn, New York.

Should you require further information or printable images, please do not hesitate to contact us. We will be happy to arrange an interview with Franziska Klotz in Berlin or to establish contact with Patricia Ayres in New York.