Lives and works in Munich

"Images without end ...", the title of Anna Klüssendorf’s 2017 exhibition, refers to her major interest of giving a particular image a permanent relevance by painting it. In the ongoing times of the Iconic Turn - the change in universal habits of communication from words to the consumption of more and more images – the half life of a single image has become shorter and shorter. The time from recognition to deletion in our brain often takes only parts of seconds, and from our daily mass only a few impressions remain remembered. Trying to counteract the deterioration of images, Anna Klüssendorf intensively studies images from different sources such as newspapers, journals, movies, or even online. The selection of an image as a templet for her painting purely depends on her emotional reaction towards it. Most images show single individuals or group scenes, sometimes animals or even landscapes. At first glance her choice seems arbitrary and asks for the common denominator between the different subjects choosen to be painted. At a closer look many images have a certain hue towards melancholy, romantic, loneliness, or even drama. Supported by her time consuming painting process using highly diluted and overlapping glaze layers the slowly evolving figures and motives become an atmospheric and emotional loaden appereance. As result, Anna Klüssendorf nobilitates in her paintings an image devoted for short term consumption into an emotionally loaded, recognizable, valueable and long lasting picture.