Clemens Krauss in 2025

Touched
13.11. - 20.12.2025

Clemens Krauss’ exhibition ‘Touched’ extends his ongoing enquiry into interconnection and its political and psychological dimensions. This new series of work unfolds as a constellation of bodies – humanoid, geometric, aerial, and organic – that, while seemingly disparate, are unified by a shared interrogation of corporeality.

Krauss’ method derives from his dual training as artist and psychoanalyst, grounded in the therapeutic technique of free association. He conceives viewing as an interpretive act through which unconscious material becomes perceptible, inviting audiences to engage their own subjective frameworks of meaning and allow latent thoughts and dream imagery to surface in response to the work. Prioritising the viewer’s agency over authorial intent, Krauss positions the canvas as a zone of ambivalence where tenderness and aggression, and seduction and foreboding coexist. Several works can be rotated and installed at varying orientations, embodying a freedom that mirrors the openness of interpretation they invite.

A hallmark of Krauss’ practice is his treatment of paint as an autonomous object. His thick oil impasto solidifies into rhythmic topographies of colour that appear to curl and crest of their own accord, forming a living membrane the mediates the encounter between artist and observer. The viewer’s eye can almost retrace his gestures, as successive layers of paint are lavishly applied and scraped back to reveal the primed canvas beneath – an unexpectedly intimate encounter with the medium. When installed on the wall, the works’ sculptural presence becomes pronounced: dense surfaces confer a tangible three-dimensionality, extending into the viewer’s space and casting subtle shadows that further animate the surface.

In ‘Touched’, Krauss reveals the body as a mutable field of potentiality – neither human nor object, but creaturely and systemic. Works such as Silence presents the aerodynamic body of a supersonic machine, probing how protection and destruction can occupy the same aesthetic surface. In his Blossoms series, floral forms unfold like genital organs – trunks erupting into buds, protected by delicate petaled lips – while the geometric structures of On Concrete stage an uncanny moment, their architectural connotations defamiliarised through implausible exteriors.

The Orgy, Constellation, and Re-Flesh series return to Krauss’ signature compositions of human-like forms captured in ambiguous interactions. Their iridescent choreographies oscillate between abstraction and figuration, rendered in a vivid palette of ultramarine blue, carmine red, and searing green. Rejecting traditional perspective, Krauss collapses the distinction between foreground and background, leaving his bodies adrift within expansive, indeterminate swathes of negative space without any definitive sense of hierarchy or narrative. These are not illustrations or portraits; rather, they are enacted moments of transference and friction between systems.

Ultimately, ‘Touched’ posits painting as both a psychological and social act: an arena where bodies emerge through physical and affective contact. Krauss situates aesthetic experience as a site of psychic excavation and negotiation, compelling viewers to confront their own position within the collective. ‘Touched’ is not merely about the act of touching, but the condition of being touched – by art, and by one another.

– Amelia Kynaston, 2025