︎︎︎STATEMENT

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            Charlotte Klobassa is an Austrian artist of the younger generation who will present herself to the Slovenian public for the first time at the RAVNIKAR GALLERY SPACE. Klobassa is a painter who approaches the medium with great studiousness, problematising the idea of pictorial composition and constantly reflecting on how each individual (extremely precise and thoughtful) brushstroke communicates with the others and how they all work together. She experiences her relationship with the painting as a living organism: although she may have a clear idea of the end result at the beginning of the process, the painter and the painting evolve together. The artist follows the principle of the cycle change – repaint – change again. In her latest art practice, she has devoted herself to exploring the appropriation of foreign and unfamiliar forms that carry certain (seemingly insignificant) meanings in their original environment. In the series Scribbles, for example, she has explored images that people have scribbled on drawing pads in stationery shops to try out different pens. These drawings are sincere, impulsive and unconsciously composed, as their unknown authors do not think about what they are drawing and why; this is the exact opposite of the act of painting, where the moment you decide to paint, you are already planning the process and the moment of impartiality is over before it has even begun. So the artist takes various elements and motifs from her surroundings, whether abstract or figurative, which she transforms into canvases in a mixture of portraiture, still life and abstraction: she tears the gesture of a person's hand out of its original context, internalises it and makes it her own.

            The idea of appropriating forms with the aim of understanding them better is also relevant for the present series, in which the artist builds on the repertoire of expressive means she has collected over the many years of exploration. At the same time, her paintings address a relatively new phenomenon. In recent years, Klobassa has observed a growing interest in nature as a place of refuge, which can always be observed when humanity is confronted with a major and significant social upheaval, while in the 21st century, the threat of inevitable natural disasters is joined by potential social disintegration. Such a retreat from "dirty civilisation" or a return to "pristine nature" can be observed in history since early industrialisation and the Rococo period, and later in the Arts & Crafts and the Art Nouveau movements. Even then, resistance to the technical revolution led to a pictorial language that artificially imitated organic forms. The artist understands today's atmosphere as a kind of calm before the storm, in which fetishised natural forms represent our love of nature and at the same time its absence, so that we try to integrate it into our lives in various ways, most recently through the popular collecting of houseplants. The painted canvases function as totems, pieces of nature that we desperately cling to, elevate, imitate and ultimately appropriate.



︎︎︎ABOUT THE ARTIST

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            Charlotte Klobassa (1987) lives and works in Vienna and Berlin. In 2017, Klobassa graduated with honours from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where she studied painting and animated film with prof. Judith Eisler. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, for example at the Viennese gallery Zeller van Almsick, Ruttkowski;68 (Cologne) and ASPN (Leipzig). Her work is also regularly presented at art fairs, such as Vienna Contemporary (2018), Art Rotterdam (2020) and SWAB Barcelona Art Fair (2021). In 2021 she will premiere her artworks in RAVNIKAR GALLERY SPACE as well as prepare for a solo show at Art Düsseldorf (2022).

︎︎︎INSTALLATION VIEWS

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