The Kienzle Art Foundation is delighted to invite you to the opening of the exhibition Franziska Hufnagel and Erika Krause. zeitmatt perplex on Friday, 27 February 2026, at 6 p.m. The artists will be present.

Both approaches are experimental and are developed from within the process itself, without any prior, precise conception—yet from two diametrically opposed directions:

There is at least one level on which the two painterly approaches of Franziska Hufnagel and Erika Krause communicate with one another despite all their striking particularities: they confront their audience with unusual challenges when viewing their works. For they are less (or more) “pictures” than most people would expect of abstract painting, and they invite viewers to engage unreservedly with their structures and properties—an engagement that can indeed lead to irritation, dizziness, or a sense of detachment from one’s immediate surroundings […].
– (Clemens Krümmel in Hula Hoop magazine on the exhibition at the Municipal Gallery Waldkraiburg, 2025)

Franziska Hufnagel’s works appear to be driven forward with particular restlessness. Each painting presents a different challenge. The material of color acquires a tactile quality, and the individual image almost constitutes itself as a performance—not least because both the pictorial surface and the written surface are repeatedly extended, supplemented, and overpainted. This constant adding, braking, removing, and altering also defines Erika Krause’s works. Just as the origin of language is sound, here the line—in rudimentary reduction—becomes the starting point for formations of shape and script-like elements. These gestures appear as markings, signs, and abbreviations floating across glazed surfaces. In contrast to the previously mentioned tempo, the movement here seems at once to proceed and to stand still.

The theme of “time” is inscribed in both working processes—whether expressed in conscious emptying or in exuberant accumulation. In Erika Krause’s case, it is the time that lies between the individual, sparing gestures and that grows the longer one lingers before her paintings. In Franziska Hufnagel’s work, a similar expansion of time emerges through multiple overpaintings and crossings-out, and through writing within the image that seems never to end. The discrepancy between these two conceptions of the image constitutes the exhibition’s particular appeal: it offers a highly disparate experiential space, a subtle ping-pong of humor and sharpness.

BIO:

Franziska Hufnagel has long been associated with the Kienzle Art Foundation; in 2011 she curated only the foundation’s third exhibition, What a Horror to Write a Play, which centered on works by Josef Kramhöller—himself a permanent presence at the Kienzle Art Foundation from the very beginning. Erika Krause, like Franziska Hufnagel, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. She has received numerous awards and grants for her artistic work.