Séance

Andrey Klassen
Séance

STRABAG Kunstforum is pleased to invite you to the exhibition Séance by ANDREY KLASSEN.

OPENING
Wednesday, 6.11.2024, 6–9 p.m.

WELCOME
6.30 p.m.
Siegfried Wanker, Board Member STRABAG SE

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Angela Stief, Director Albertina Modern, Jury Member STRABAG Artaward International

Andrey Klassen's magical pictorial worlds consist of superimposed narrative layers, dimensional leaps, fantastic and hybrid figures, which he incorporates into an abstract-figurative web of lines and dissolving forms, condensing them into black, white and gray palimpsests. Andrey Klassen, who was born in Siberia in 1984, studied in Dresden and now lives and works in Hamburg, creates works, that seem to have sprung from a realm between light and shadow; fictitious worlds and shadowy figures enchant and lead to other worlds. His art pieces allude to the spiritual practices of indigenous peoples, shamanistic rituals and spiritualistic sessions from the 19th century. The contrast to a modern, enlightened society could hardly be formulated more blatantly. One gradually recognizes in the anachronistic-looking ink drawings that this lost remnant, which we have suppressed from our secularized consciousness, perhaps exists after all. In Klassen's art, a dark, almost impenetrable seed unfolds into a wonderful blossom; as in Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, romanticism, melancholy and world-weariness intermingle.
Angela Stief

ON VIEW
7.11.–.5.12.2024

exhibition video

Andrey Klassen on video