Klaus Mosettig Livres

Together with the special exhibition Caravaggio & Bernini, the Kunsthistorisches Museum is showing a new series of works by the Austrian artist Klaus Mosettig in the Bassano Hall. His series The David Plates is based on X-rays of Caravaggio?s painting David with the Head of Goliath from the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The fifteen large-scale drawings were created by artist Klaus Mosettig in his Vienna studio over a period of almost two years, from the autumn of 2017 through to the summer of 2019.00The process that Mosettig used to make the drawings is every bit as mechanical and systematic as that which created the X-rays in the first place. The plates were first converted into medium format slides and beamed onto large sheets of paper. Working in strict positional sequence, Mosettig moved across each sheet from top to bottom, left to right, transferring the information that he received in the form of projected light into graphite strokes of varying intensities. Each stroke was applied in the same diagonal orientation, with Mosettig careful to minimize any sense of emphasis or personal interpretation, recording each detail as he saw it.00Exhibition: Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Austria (15.10.2019 - 19.01.2020).

Klaus Mosettigs Zyklus „Withdrawal“ ist eine zeichnerische Auseinandersetzung mit Josef Albers' Serie „Homage to the Square“. Mit Bleistiften unterschiedlicher Härte schafft er mimetisch exakte Doppelgänger der Albers'schen Vor-Bilder, in Tonwerten zwischen Schwarz und Weiß. Nach seinen zeichnerischen Remakes der Jackson Pollock'schen drippings arbeitet er nun mit den kalkulierten, geometrisch geregelten Anordnungen in den Bildern von Josef Albers, vertreibt allerdings, nach der Vernichtung der Spontaneität Pollocks, hier die Albers'schen Farben und ihre Gefühlswerte. Mosettigs unendlich langsame, unendlich genaue Abzeichnungen sind meditative Exerzitien, die dem Betrachter anbieten, sich in der langsamen Kunst der subtilen Differenzwahrnehmung zu üben. Klaus Mosettig lebt in Wien. Zahlreiche Ausstellungen, u. a. Saatchi Gallery London, Buchmann Galerie Berlin, Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Brett Shaheen Gallery Cleveland, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Stuart Shave/Modern Art London, Kunstraum Dornbirn, mumok Wien, Secession Wien.

In September 2018, Kunsthalle Darmstadt showed five almost identical large-format pencil drawings by Klaus Mosettig. Their subject: the ink-stained surface of a table in a Greek reception camp for refugees. This is where the port authority took the fingerprints of refugees arriving from Turkey. The Viennese art historian Catharina Kahane discovered this table when she was working as a refugee worker on the island of Leros and sent photographs of its surface to Mosettig. The striking traces on the table—an unintended picture created by the refugees and port police, which the artist now „remakes“—are reminiscent of abstract expressions; they emerge from the artist’s disappearance in his work. Mosettig intensifies the incalculable human and political catastrophe in his meditative activity. This publication documents the series of drawings and the limited edition prints Negative Handwriting.