Clara Gesang-Gottowt (b. 1985, Stockholm; SE) is a painter living and working in Lund. She graduated from the MFA programme at the Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm; SE) in 2013 and her works are included in the permanent collections of Moderna Museet (Stockholm; SE) and Malmö Konstmusem (Malmö; SE) among other institutions.
Clara Gesang-Gottowt’s paintings engage with ideas of bodily memory, exploring ways in which emotional and sensory experience is stored in the nervous system. The artist tends to favour timeless motifs such as landscapes, flowers, water, flames and other light sources. Her abstract compositions often seem to trigger the unconscious mind, helping the viewer to remember environments from the past whilst also offering new perceptual frameworks to understand the present. Gesang-Gottowt is instantly recognisable for her sophisticated understanding of colour and a nuanced approach to painting that combines careful layering with subtractive gestures of scraping or wiping away. The images that remain often feel suspended somewhere between a state of coming-into-being and gradual disappearance, vaguely familiar yet elusive, and endlessly contemplative.
"IWhen a painting is finished I want it to have a strong presence and atmosphere. I think that the state of mind I am searching for originates in memories from nature. Throughout my life I have been collecting memories of nature, but my paintings are never studies of it."
– Clara-Gesang Gottowt
Clara Gesang-Gottowt’s paintings engage with ideas of bodily memory, exploring ways in which emotional and sensory experience is stored in the nervous system. The artist tends to favour timeless motifs such as landscapes, flowers, water, flames and other light sources. Her abstract compositions often seem to trigger the unconscious mind, helping the viewer to remember environments from the past whilst also offering new perceptual frameworks to understand the present. Gesang-Gottowt is instantly recognisable for her sophisticated understanding of colour and a nuanced approach to painting that combines careful layering with subtractive gestures of scraping or wiping away. The images that remain often feel suspended somewhere between a state of coming-into-being and gradual disappearance, vaguely familiar yet elusive, and endlessly contemplative.
"IWhen a painting is finished I want it to have a strong presence and atmosphere. I think that the state of mind I am searching for originates in memories from nature. Throughout my life I have been collecting memories of nature, but my paintings are never studies of it."
– Clara-Gesang Gottowt