Daring and without fear of big topics, Claudia Chaseling ́s expansive paintings connect very different vocabularies, visual finds, texts, sources, and references to highly charged image sequences and spatial works which bring conceptual rigour and sensitive imagination, order, and chaos into an insoluble whole. The motifs – distorted landscapes, organic forms, and glaring wave structures – tip, break, and inundate one another and lead back to foundational examinations and the questioning of being-in-the-world. This generates works that suddenly change the exhibition space and the perceptive space of the viewer. Chaseling creates visual events that continually discard themselves, turn around, and begin again differently. They perform sudden “rabbit jumps”- and thereby always offer unforeseen visual paths. The convulsive, bright – at first glance abstract – image spaces are under lied by the barbaric excesses of violence returned to the Occident, and by tormented nature that, as insignia of a feral self-assertion of man, make this present. An emphatic doubt takes the place of modernity ́s emphatic belief in progress and its artistic analog; a doubt, that is no ideological addition, but arises entirely from the conflictive, painterly forms. Painterly magic becomes reflection; reflection becomes image magic.


Book Launch Spatial Painting: September 23 at 5pm.

The exhibition is supported by the Australian National University.