With the show ‘Double Bind’, Artport presents the first solo exhibition of Berlin based Austrian artist Clemens Krauss in Israel.

The show combines a series of paintings with recent video works. Physical treatment of paint responds to biographically embedded identity, approached through a narration which follows free association.

Throughout his artistic oeuvre, Krauss deals with the significance and meaning of gestures. By analyzing the motivations behind poses, movements and language of interaction in various contexts and their medial representation, Krauss points out the in-between, the hidden and subtle content within. Bearing the implied but severe substance, Krauss´ new series of paintings reveal individuals in devastated surroundings. First, causing an attraction in its aesthetical abstract composition, the works surprise with their deeply socio-analytical symbolism.

In his video work ‘Double Bind’ Krauss looks at the correlation of his social, political and cultural environment in the settings of Tel Aviv and Berlin. The video shows a fictional dialogue between two people from different generations and backgrounds who don’t know each other and have never met. Their realities seem to exist parallel to each other. Talking about their desires, opinions and perspectives regarding the historical and very current path of both cities, the two individuals almost never cross each other´s world.

In ‘The Taster’ an old lady is filmed while eating. Margot Wölk, born 1917 in Berlin, was obligated to taste the meals of Adolf Hitler for possible poisoning in the final years of World War II. She is known as the last living testimony of this kind of apparatus. The video shows her during an action that is both existential and intimate and bizarre – regarding her duty as Hitler’s food-taster.

The video ‘ER’, a collaboration with renowned German film director Benjamin Heisenberg, has more biographical connotations. Own film material, which the artist has shot in his earliest teenage years, has been reassembled to a story of a fictitious, peculiar character known only as ‘ER’ (He). A computer-generated voice relates this boy’s history, who grows up in a rural environment near the German-Austrian border and blackmails his parents with outbursts of rage and simulated epileptic fits.

Clemens Krauss focuses in his work on different body concepts, which conceive of the body as a site of political conflicts and interpersonal relationships, thematize its performative appropriation of experiences, or consider it as an ambivalent bearer of private history and personal identity. At the same time, his works emphasize the specifically organic quality of “bodies” in a broader sense, including also working material and living environments.

Born 1981 in Austria, Krauss has presented his works in numerous international solo and group exhibitions and has realized site-specific installations in both institutional and commercial exhibition spaces.

Recent exhibitions include institutions such as Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kulturhuset Stockholm, Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art Berlin, MOCA Los Angeles, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, MAM Museo de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro. In 2012 he participated in the exhibition ‘I am a Berliner’ at the Tel Aviv Museum, showing international painting positions from Berlin.