Clara Gesang-Gottowt is a contemporary artist from Stockholm, known for her ethereal, introspective paintings that explore themes of memory, time and the fragility of the human experience. Her work is characterised by a dreamlike quality, often blurring the line between abstraction and figuration. Gesang-Gottowt’s use of soft, muted colour palettes and layered brushstrokes create a sense of depth and atmosphere, inviting viewers into intimate and contemplative spaces.
Something between emotional landscapes and corporeal memories, the artists’ expressions are a mode of processing, where control is relinquished and memories that cannot otherwise be conjured re-emerge on the canvas. These emotional topographies give way to fields of sensation and recollection, both intimate and vast, rendered in ethereal layers of pigment.
Gesang-Gottowt’s painting style has an extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity to light, texture and mood. This allows her to create poetic compositions that chime of impermanence and the passage of time. Through a masterful use of thin, transparent layers of oil paint, she creates a luminous depth, where colours seem to emerge and dissolve in a calming, meditative rhythm. In so doing, she reveals the light refracting off stone faces and punching through low layers of dense clouds, evoking the fleeting quiet of sunrise or sunset. This tension between darkness and light in the works leaves the viewer to negotiate which is arriving and which is departing.
The artist’s return to landscapes as subject reiterates the timeless and enduring metaphors that the natural world holds for our inner worlds. Horizons and storms allow us to project our own emotions into something physical yet ever changing.
Clara Gesang-Gottowt (b. 1985), lives and works in Lund, Sweden. Gesang-Gottowt graduated from the MFA programme at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm in 2013. Her works are included in the permanent collections of Moderna Museet (Stockholm) and Malmö Konstmusem (Malmö) among other institutions.
