About the work

Franziska Klotz’s large abstract painting in oozing tones of fiery red, pink, and gold places the viewer right up against a cordon of riot police. We are caught within the haze of tear gas, the smoke making our eyes water and our vision blur. In our unquiet era of pandemic, protests, and political upheavals the world over, we are almost too familiar with such images from the daily news. Yet no images safely separated from us by a screen can have quite the same impact of proximity, implicating us in the threat of imminent violence. Or is it, perhaps, protection from violence?

Klotz entitled this work “Leviathan” in a tribute to the philosophy of Hobbes, for whom Leviathan is the symbol of unlimited and indivisible state power. The Human, in Hobbes’s word view, is by nature a selfish being intent on self-preservation, finding the security of living together only in the institution of the state. The state protects people from themselves – but does this security come at the price of freedom? According to Hobbes, the Leviathan is necessary to overcome the chaotic original state of societies, namely the war of "all against all" and to create lasting peace and order. The basis for this is a social contract in which all members of a society renounce their ancestral freedoms and rights and transfer them to the state/sovereign, who thereby becomes the all-powerful state or the “Leviathan”, a "mortal god" who can protect people from themselves and defend them against other people.

Bio

Franziska Klotz (born 1979 in Dresden) is a painter. For her, painting is not a medium “among many”, not at all; it is the medium in which she puts all her energy, time, heart, and soul into, and she expertly explores its potential. Colours, the interaction with them, their effect and materiality are her world (her subject). Her painting is in the most real sense of the word a handicraft; she is hands-on, paints with her fingers, palm, she presses, rubs, smears, literally transfers her energy onto her paintings, and they acquire their intensity and allure from her state of mind and gestures. Meanwhile, she loves oil paint, its sensuality and materiality.