b.1969, Bad Nauheim, Germany
Lives & works Cologne, Germany
Claudia Larissa Artz undertook her art studies at the prestigious Kunstakadamie Düsseldorf, graduating as a Meisterschülerin (‘master student’) of Swiss abstract artist, Prof. Helmut Federle.
Artz has continued to evolve her own philosophy of the form in abstraction. Her work is informed by a serious and continuous quest to resolve the aesthetic duality of line versus surface, and the search for universal forms that express belief (Glauben) and affirmation (Bekenntnis), and an exploration of time and space.
Artz’s use of geometry reminds us of humankind’s striving for perfection and pure intellectual transcendence. It links us to the abstract, the conceptual world of mathematics, science, navigation and architectural drawing. This is a place of exactitude and a reduction to the absolute minimum: a line, precisely drawn onto the paper with a sharpened pencil. Geometry, then, stands as a representation of our intellectual life.
Conversely, Artz’s delicately textured application of pigments, eggtempera and watercolour evoke our emotional life: organic, individual, unpredictable, difficult to predetermine and control. As with her pigments, we can never fully know how we will respond emotionally to an event. We may have preconceptions, but we can never really know our emotional reactions until we are in the midst of them, and then, it is not always easy to control them. There exists a tension between our conscious will (mind) and our emotional reactions (heart).
With the methodological thoroughness of a scientist, Artz sets up her series of investigations to determine just how texture and line intersect, and how they might be reconciled, if at all. It mirrors our own daily practice as we try to balance the workings of our mind and the flux of emotions; sometimes we find equilibrium, and other times one takes precedence.
The perplexing questions, as with Artz’s artistic question of line vs texture, are: can they merge, and if so, what do they become?
View selected available works on the Buy now/Contemporary page. Or email us for additional works.
26.03-10.04.2022
A site specific work installed in St Gertrud church, Cologne, Germany.
Claudia Larissa Artz was invited to create a work that responded directly to the interior of this concrete brutalist church designed by German architect, Gottfried Böhm (1920-2021).
Drawing on her own early training as an interior architect, Artz created a piece comprising 155 pieces of painted and folded paper. In keeping with the ceiling, the appearance of the paper peaks and valleys changed from sharply defined to muted as the ambient light in the vast interior shifted with the sun’s passage.
Spread out across the floor, reflecting space also recalls an oversize shroud or a pattern for an ecclesiastical cope.
The installation continued with 14 paintings in the crypt which further explored Böhm’s concrete folds and negative spaces.