After venturing to the limits of abstraction in recent years, and occasionally even exceeding them, Franziska Klotz returns to a style of painting more oriented on the object in her current works. At the center of our exhibition is a group of nine paintings that invariably depict faces of women who convey to their audience an air of seriousness and dignity, but above all self-confidence. Wholly motif – and at the same time wholly painting; strange and yet familiar, close yet remote.

A closer look reveals the specific features of these faces: the models of Franziska Klotz’s paintings are not girls and women sitting face-to-face with the artist, but portraits of women painted on thin wooden panels, who have not been amongst the living for nearly two thousand years. Captured by unknown painters in Egypt, these Roman-style paintings portray ladies of the upper classes who were originally entombed with a panel above the mummified corpses wrapped in thin gauze strips of cloth. The face of the deceased could thus be preserved for the afterlife in its undisturbed beauty and individuality as a souvenir of youth, of beauty, of elegance, of wisdom … in short, of life in its diversity and uniqueness.

Now the fractures, the injuries and the imperfections, that these double-painted faces have are explained. These are neither traces of a modern gestural-expressive painting act, nor wounds of two-thousand-year- old faces. Rather, they are the traces that history has made on the wooden panels and their depictions.Franziska Klotz’s mummy portraits are pictures of pictures that take the originally painted image as seriously as its history as an object. The works of Franziska Klotz portray an object that is itself a painting: a wooden panel bearing a painted portrait of a woman. These portraits are thus a reflection on painting and its tasks in regard to the means of painting itself. Above all, however, they are a deeply felt reflection on the nature of time. Guided by questions such as „What is eternity?“ Or „What remains?“. The ephemeral nature is confronted with eternal and everlasting culture.

With all the realism of the depiction – both the two-thousand-year-old portraits of women on their wooden plaques and the canvas prints of these portraits by Franziska Klotz painted on wooden panels – in the end, art is victorious. Even the original purpose of the portraits, the adornment of the embalmed and thus already artificially processed body with a painted portrait, is a victory of culture over nature, which here made eternal by art. Franziska Klotz turns these works of art, with their own two-thousand-year history, into works that are much more than a mere image. Her handwriting, her individual stroke of the brush, is just as noticeable as the handwriting of the painter who painted the portrait of an Egyptian in Roman style on a thin wooden panel almost two thousand years ago.

But just as time has left its mark on the Egyptian artifact, Franziska Klotz’s recently created painting will tell its story of an artist who, in the age of digital virtuality, is grappling with an object that outlasts time. It’s not the eternal youth of Dorian Gray that can be seen in Franziska Klotz’s works, nor the horrors of the portrait, which has aged so terribly in his stead, but a dignity of aging and a respect for history, for the individual as well as the entirety of humanity.

This respect for things also characterizes the other works of the exhibition with their depictions of plants, a letter, the façade of a house, a sleeping human or a door similar to a pin board with its multitude of objects. The visible world is taken seriously in all works, but at the same time the free play of colors and forms is not abandoned. Painting remains painting, and a painting is always more than just its motif. The object in the picture is therefore both: an image of a transitory object as well as an immortal motif of a work of art.Franziska Klotz was awarded the Max Ernst Scholarship of the city of Brühl after studying painting at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee. At the invitation of the Goethe-Institut, she received a scholarship from the Cultural Academy Tarabya in Istanbul, where she stayed for six months in 2015 and to which she returned for a two-month stay at the beginning of 2018. Her works are exhibited worldwide, including the 4th Moscow International Biennial for Young Art 2014, the 56th October Salon in Belgrade 2016 and the Fanø Art Museum in Denmark in 2017.