Kitty Kraus

Kitty Kraus uses ironed and deconstructed suits, that is to say cuts, as the starting materials for a series of works: for her flash-animations which show the human body as an abstract figure, deconstructed into lengths and angles, for her constructions of sheet glass that remodel body proportions and attitudes as functional and simplified forms. If for Rodchenko the line, drawn with a ruler and a compass, was the appropriate means for constructing clearly defined, modern, and functional objects, for Kitty Kraus it is the approach towards a well-aimed deconstruction, for interrogating the foundations and limits of our notional, theoretical, and normative apparatus. Kraus’s works seem to be charged with the myths of modernism: its purity laws, its yearning for transcendence, the optimistic belief in the utopian potential of technology. But precisely these associations are shown as absurd by her works. In an almost mechanical, robot-like way, Krauss operates on the cadaver of a modernism that lost its innocence in DIY-stores, concrete apartment buildings, and office towers of the post WW II society. Divided into rectangular modules representing “upper body” and “lower body”, her glass and cloth constructions exercise different variations of movements and attitudes in space, stripped of meaning. Human beings become the function of their social habitus. (Oliver Koerner von Gustorf, Galerie Neu)