Berlin-based artist Clemens Krauss is renowned for his pastose paintings, in which he explores the relationship between the individual and the larger collective. With his new series Sediments, he turns his attention for the first time to the world of objects, the tangible and physical presence.

Replacing the human figure, Krauss now presents buildings, surfaces, and everyday objects as vessels of temporality, history, and memory. In doing so, he shifts the focus from interpersonal relationships to the corporeality of things, while simultaneously articulating a distance from an anthropocentric perspective.

The artist's characteristic thick, impasto application of paint remains central to the work. Layer by layer, Krauss deposits oil paint onto the canvas, creating relief-like surfaces that evoke geological sediments. Like natural processes of accumulation, time, movement, and material condense into complex, stratified structures. This principle of layering also reflects a fundamental aspect of his artistic thinking: the psychoanalytic uncovering of hidden strata. Meaning does not emerge immediately but gradually develops through the accumulation of material and visual layers.

Light and shadow activate these sculptural surfaces, opening shifting perceptual spaces between image and object, surface and depth. Beneath the upper layers of paint, vivid flashes of color repeatedly emerge like traces of memory, revealing earlier states and making the temporal dimension of the painting process visible.

Psychoanalysis provides a conceptual framework in which body, material, and history are understood as inseparable. Drawing on Sigmund Freud's famous assertion that "the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego... ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly those springing from the surface of the body," corporeality becomes the foundation of psychic organization. In this sense, Krauss regards psychoanalysis as one of the few disciplines capable of bringing together matter, self-perception, memory, and subjectivity.

The new works originate in observations of urban environments. Architecture appears not simply as built form but as a sedimented repository of cultural, historical, and material processes. Materials such as stone, clay, concrete, and water possess their own temporality and material memory. In Krauss's paintings they acquire an autonomous corporeality—understood as a sedimented relationship between material, time, and environment. The works thus unfold a productive tension between construction and erosion, geometric order and painterly gesture. Sedimentsdoes not represent a rupture but a logical continuation of Krauss's artistic practice, in which the boundaries between organic and inorganic matter, psychic and material history, as well as between image and object, increasingly dissolve.