Bateman Crawfort

ABOUT the WORK

Fleeting forms captured, fixed and captured, frozen, fluid moods of light, atmospheres pictorially captured: in Claudia Klein‘s works, the perception of precisely the most ephemeral elements of nature plays a major role. Her photographic pieces, like her painted works, explore themes such as the present moment and infinity, as well as the relationship between the two. The perpetual movement of the sea, the continuous change of the sky, the decay of plants: these processes find their analogy in painting: the conscious (inter)flow of colour on ground, working outdoors. Claudia Klein integrates the influence of nature in her works, allows metamorphoses: Nature destroys and adds, accelerates or slows down ageing processes. Klein‘s photographic and artistic practice invokes both ancient and modern

mythologies of the sublime and opens up questions about the aesthetics of nature and the positioning of the perceiver in the natural space. The search for alternative ways of living, for reassurance with nature and for the energy of the invisible result in a visual language that is as abstract as it is ephemeral. In her work Metamorphosis I a Metamorphosis II, the genres of photography and painting are intertwined. A picture she painted in nature, the only one shown in the exhibition on canvas with acrylic, is captured in its drying process with all the traces that the place has left on the canvas. The view of it is neither documentary nor repro-photographic, but a pictorial transposition of the found moment, the almost impressionistic mood of light, which is of great importance for her painterly work