Claus Brunsmann

Claus Brunsmann is a German painter who lives and works in Berlin. He studied painting at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and earned his MFA in 1996. His paintings were shown in numerous exhibitions in Europe, the US and in China. His paintings are part of private and institutional collections. 
 
Claus Brunsmann uses oils to paint large, abstract canvases with bright colors. He refers back to a conception of history that is a legacy of German idealism, and therefor of Romantic aesthetic, according to which the artist reveals interior truths, and unexpected perspectives and cognitive modes, to the world. The process of revelation is manifest in the layers of the painting, which assumes the character of the overlapping patches and thus also of memory at the same time erased and unveiled by the appearance and disappearance of color. The nature of the self and of things becomes the principal field on which the painting itself insists: the observer is called upon to perform the same journey indicated and practiced by the artist, penetrating gradually into the color systems of the painting and being gradually sucked into it: first of all he is struck by the most superficial layers, then he perceives the less evident ones, and so on, through a way of looking that must develop in time and therefore an attitude that is both contemplative and active. The artist thus intends to provide an extremely synthetic position with regards to history, in full agreement with the premise of Romantic idealism: history as a temporal development in which the spectator is also he who experiences it and helps to build it.