As part of KEWENIG's exhibition format '12 Rooms', a monthly rotating artist program in the enclosed room between the gallery and the adjacent building, Christof Kraus presents a grid installation of 20 'Strainer drawings' from 2020.

Drawing through a printing screen filled with colour, the German artist transfers the pigments onto a sheet of handmade paper. His gesture translates into a skewed line, which first seems fragmented and hesitant, but at closer look turns out to be the result of compressed paint. This very specific approach to drawing not only calls to mind naive depictions of mountains, landscapes, surface and shapes, but becomes an abstraction of itself.

Kraus states: 'Sometimes I print the whole screen surface on the paper. The resulting surface then schematically carries the traces of previous drawings as a negative appears on the colour field. Due to overlapping and blurring, I perceive the shape of the printed sheet as a painting which is open for any search for images.' His drawings are nurtured by spiritual memories and thus represent a concretization of the meta-level, which in this case questions the reproduction of emotionality. Kraus does not aim to portray emotion, but rather to depict the emotionalized object.

Christof Kraus (b. 1978 in Erlangen) lives and works in Berlin.

Press release courtesy KEWENIG.