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Claudia Mann

Elysium Planitia
05.24.13 - 06.23.13
Exhibition — Espace Croix-Baragnon

Pitztal, 2012. © Claudia Mann.

Claudia Mann, Elysium Planitia, 2013. Photo Nicolas Brasseur, Toulouse International Art Festival, 2013 ©Le Printemps de septembre

Claudia Mann, Elysium Planitia, 2013. Photo Nicolas Brasseur, Toulouse International Art Festival, 2013 ©Le Printemps de septembre

Claudia Mann, Elysium Planitia, 2013. Photo Nicolas Brasseur, Toulouse International Art Festival, 2013 ©Le Printemps de septembre

Claudia Mann, Elysium Planitia, 2013. Photo Nicolas Brasseur, Toulouse International Art Festival, 2013 ©Le Printemps de septembre

Born in 1982 in Wuppertal (Germany), she lives and works in Düsseldorf (Germany).


Claudia Mann works exclusively as a sculptress and manages to propose novel
forms in her youthful career staked out by assumed links. Looking at the veneer pieces created by the young artist in 2011, it is hard to ignore the presence of the English
sculptor Tony Cragg (1949) in the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie, where Claudia Mann was a student. While she does not borrow the principles of accumulation and stratification peculiar to the sculptor from the previous generation, the visual kinship stems from one and the same desire to signify movement, in a momentum that is not
mechanical, but organic. The artist herself uses the term ‘skin’ when she describes how her sculptures are covered. Beneath the skin, there is a plastic force, a capacity to construct an object, well-known in the work of another German sculptress, Rebecca Horn (1944). 

 

Claudia Mann is less figurative than her elder, and asserts her compliance with the diktat of matter. The rigidity of the weft of the carpet used in her work Pitzal (2012) forces the artist to handle it in bits; because the pieces put end-to-end only tolerate a single fold, they all converge towards a centre, a node in the form’s development. Even if, as a sculptress, Claudia Mann expresses the way she steps back from the material, it is nevertheless she who chooses it, sensing the identity that she will extract from it by way of an autonomous, invented construction, an architectured meteorite fallen from a fantastic cosmos.

Exhibition co-produced with the International Art Festival in Toulouse, with the support
of the French Institute in the framework of its agreement with the City of Toulouse.