Portrait of Clara Gesang-Gottowt. Courtesy of the artist and OTP Copenhagen.
OTP: Is it accurate to describe these works as abstract landscape paintings?
CGG: I very much see them as landscape paintings. But what drives me to paint them is the relation between the colours, the structures from the brush strokes, and the light. My interest in landscapes comes from the desire to be touched. For that I don’t need beautiful sunsets or Northern Lights. It's more about small things: like a coltsfoot looking up, like a little sun, from among the brown leaves in a ditch on a late winter's day. Or a sudden heavy rain that drenches you. Thunder. A field of heather. Those things stay in my mind and body and later I find them in my paintings. I see it as a circular thing. What I paint, I see in nature, and what I see, effects my paintings.
When a painting is finished I want it to have a strong presence and atmosphere. I think that the state of mind I am searching for originates in memories from nature. It very much has to do with bodily and sensory memories. Throughout my life I have been collecting memories of nature, but my paintings are never studies of nature. I find it hard to separate painting and nature.
Clara Gesang-Gottowt, Fall III, 2023, oil on linen, 65 x 76 cm. Courtesy of the artist and OTP Copenhagen.
OTP: How would you describe your interest in the threshold between land and sea?
CGG: Again it’s the structure, the colours and the meeting between materials that is interesting to me. The horizontal, transparent and changeable water that meets the opaque and vertical vegetation. I never choose motifs with the intention to tell something specific, but afterwards I can sometimes see some intention. One thing I can say about my relationship to land and sea is that I lost my big brother in a drowning accident. It was because of that I started to paint. Painting became my sanctuary, a place where I could feel free for a moment. Since then, water and the ocean have always been connected with danger and grief.
Over the years I have been thinking about painting water and the sea but it never felt right. It was first in 2019, when I was expecting my second child, that I could finally approach the motif. I was then working for an exhibition in Lund Cathedral. The whole context of being pregnant and vulnerable and actually having a child swimming around inside my body while I was working with paintings for the church made me want to go there – to the water. Then, water was very much about death but also about life. Maybe I am back dealing with those questions again.
Clara Gesang-Gottowt, Coast, 2023, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and OTP Copenhagen.
OTP: Many of these paintings were produced at the same time and in the same dimensions - can we understand them as a sequence?
CGG: Yes. For the first time I have limited the conditions of my practice to specific dimensions. Time was limited and that forced me to keep to those chosen conditions. Normally I find myself doing something other than what I have originally planned. When I stuck to the plan I felt a freedom in the limitation. The paintings came easily and fast, all during October and November, and that limited period of time also gave them a closer relation.
For the first time, I have also kept to the same motif, or at least the same scene, in every painting of the exhibition – near the sea. I was first expecting that this shared premise was going to make the paintings more about painting and less about a narrative, that the eye would look and compare the different colours and structures etc. But in the end the sequence maybe created a stronger sense of narrative.
Clara Gesang-Gottowt, The Island II, 2023, oil on linen, 63 x 56 cm. Courtesy of the artist and OTP Copenhagen.
OTP: Your work has previously been described as a Nordic, Romantic Abstract Expressionism. Do you relate to these ideas, and if so, how?
CGG: l can relate to Abstract Expressionism and to American artists such as Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler. I also very much relate to Expressionism and artists like Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde. I think it’s hard to paint without giving expression to one's own feelings.
As I mentioned before, I paint very intuitively and in the process I am searching for something that touches me. I think that is the same thing as expressing what you have within you. Or perhaps I paint a place where I need to be. But I don’t think of myself, or other artists, as part of certain movements. I feel connected with artists from many different periods.
Clara Gesang-Gottowt, The Coast, 2023, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and OTP Copenhagen.
OTP: You attended a Waldorf school for some years. Could I ask you to talk a little bit about the impact of Rudolf Steiner’s teachings on your approach to art?
CGG: Oh, this is a huge question. I was attending Waldorf schools from the age of three to nineteen and it has had an impact on different levels. What is still very strong for me are my memories of events from this time that touched all my senses.
One example is from when I was about ten years old and my class were making beeswax candles. It was in a dark classroom, only lit by candles, and we had two large cauldrons of melted beeswax. The classroom was impregnated by the smell and it was a devout feeling to circulate around the cauldron and see how the candles were growing on the wick with each turn. We felt the danger of the hot wax and it felt huge to be given that responsibility and to create something so beautiful together.
I have many magical memories of creating. Through the Waldorf school I have gained a relationship with forging, painting, weaving, natural colour dying, yarn spinning, knitting, book binding, ceramics, choral singing, playing the flute and the violin and so on. One year we were growing flax. So I also have experience with growing and harvesting the material for the fabric that I am now using for my painting canvases!
Clara Gesang-Gottowt, October I, 2023, oil on linen, 40 x 30 cm. Courtesy of the artist and OTP Copenhagen.
OTP: Is noise or sound important to these works? Do your paintings have an interest in Synesthesia?
CGG: To me, my paintings are quiet. Maybe sound is present through the silence. But for sure I am interested in painting that touches more of the senses than just sight. Most of all I want them to evoke something familiar. Memories or experiences that you can’t put into words but that you recognize and get in contact with through the painting. I sometimes feel that a painting is as soft as moss or heated like a warm breeze. I am more painting what something feels like than what it looks like.
As I sit in my sofa looking up at the sky I see a dark opaque grey curtain of clouds. When I am looking up a minute later the sky is suddenly clear and blue. I want the paintings to capture the changeable and the transient. It’s about about quietly accommodating the moving. About a state of appearance, or disappearance.
OTP: Do you think that anything exists beyond our sensory experience of the world?
CGG: I definitely think that there is much more than what we can experience.
Clara Gesang-Gottowt, Coast, 2023, installation view. Courtesy of the artist and OTP Copenhagen.
Clara Gesang-Gottowt (b. 1985, Stockholm; SE) lives and works in Lund, Sweden. She graduated from the MFA programme at the Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm; SE) in 2013 after completing her BFA at the Royal Institute of Art (Stockholm; SE) in 2010.
Recent exhibitions include: Skyming at Galleri Cora Hillebrand (2023, Gothenburg; SE), Necessity at Galleri Magnus Karlsson (2022, Stockholm; SE) and Atlanten at Lund Cathedral (2019, Lund; SE). Paintings by the artist are included in the permanent collections of Moderna Museet (Stockholm; SE) and Malmö Konstmuseum (Malmö; SE) among others.