Pavel Kraus

Please join us in the studio of Pavel Kraus (1946–2024) at Industry City Open Studios on Saturday and Sunday, May 18 and 19, noon–5pm.

A remembrance of his unique talent and personality, and a look at the final works in situ.

67 35th St. B 314 (Building 5, 3rd floor, suite B 314)
Industry City, Brooklyn NY 11232
Inquiries: davidebony3@gmail.com

2018. Natural resin on wood panel. Each panel 36”x 48”. 

PDF of all Baroque/Amber works.

Press Release

 LIU Brooklyn
1 University Plaza
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Jan 5 – Feb 23, 2018
Humanities Gallery

The sculptures, paintings and installations by Pavel Kraus in Rome: Marble and Lead, curated by Aaron Zulpo, evoke the spirit of antiquity, yet they are forward-looking works that are very much of the twenty-first century avant-garde. Kraus is known for his use of modernist abstract forms and unorthodox materials. He uses novel combinations of materials, including lead and wax, and marble, wood, and resin. The new exhibition focuses on his use of lead and marble, but is not exclusive to those materials.    

The Czech-born New York-based artist has a unique vision, as exemplified by the exhibition Rome: Marble and Lead. Among the highlights of the show are recent series of major works, including “Pompeii,” a remarkable group of seemingly crenulated lead vessels filled with marble elements, often punctuated with touches of colorful natural resins. White marble slabs and blocks are the principal components of the series titled “Fresh Marbles,” arranged in striking, architectonic configurations on the floor. 

Also on view are Kraus’s black and white “Offerings,” pod-like sculptures made of filled-fabrics covered in richly textured encaustic. A marble phallic sculpture, referencing an ancient “fertility god,” will also be on view. And the show’s centerpiece is Kraus’s rarely exhibited Roman Wedding (2012), produced in the artist’s studio in Rajasthan, India. This large, bed-like sculpture is made of marble with intricate inlays of semi-precious stones.  

These extraordinary works, from Kraus’s ongoing “Pompeii” and “Roman Wedding” series propose astonishing and poetically realized new forms of expression, redolent of the past, yet directed toward the future.

Project:ARTspace

156 Fifth Ave Suite 208
New York, NY 10010

The opening for PAVEL KRAUS: POMPEII, A.D. 79 is August 2, 6-8PM, and the show ends September 6. The gallery is open Monday–Friday 10AM-6PM by appointment.

For appointment: Contact Aaron Zulpo (630) 244-7160

Installation materials include lead, organic resins, encaustic, quilts and marble.

Installation photos by Thomas Wilson

Press Release

Press Release

Art100 New York, NY

7 June 2017–10 June 2017

Installation materials include lead, organic resins, encaustic, quilts, and marble.

Installation photos by Thomas Wilson

Installation materials include lead, steel, raw beeswax and quilts.

Portrait gallery: 9 self-portraits of the artist. 40 x 40 in. Mixed media on mylar.

Southern Vermonts Arts Center

930 SVAC Drive, West Road, Manchester, VT

28 May 2017—9 July 2017

Press Release

7 December 2016–7 January 2017

Project:ARTspace New York, NY

Digital Catalog

David Ebony's Top 10 New York Gallery Shows of 2016

Press Release

Stephen Romano Gallery, New York, NY.
September 2014

Enigma Catalogue

Photos by Thomas Wilson

The Proposition Gallery 1/22/11—3/13/11
2 Extra Place, New York, NY 10003

Black and white marble with carnelian, lapis lazuli, tiger eye, and malachite inlay: acid-washed laminated white water glass: Pietre Dure technique: 60" x 52" x 23"

Installation with two 30" offerings.
Overall floor space: 96: x 144"

OK Harris Gallery, 383 West Broadway, NYC

October 21—November 25, 2006.

Installation material: encaustic, lead on 72" x 48" x 3" on wooden panels, marble

PAVEL KRAUS - Artist Statement

Archaeology / Excavation

Ostensively paintings, the “Archaeology/Excavation” are crafted of tinted beeswax over wooden support. The qualities of the wax, applied in layers, convey a palpable physical presence. Areas are then carved, or ‘excavated’ out of the surface treatment to reveal the works ‘history’ of production. The works tend to shift between Minimalism’s rhetorical factuality and narrative metaphors of inference. Testing the limits of these metaphors places production of content clearly on the viewers’ capacity for examining the nature of their own species of belief. Memory becomes a type of interiorized excavation, a mix of contrasting metaphors, which pit a sense of history as an ordered set of facts with a more elusive and subjective sense of our own experience; chaotic and historically unconscious. Selective evaluation of this data does not alter history, but it does inform our motives for significance of objects and practices. Where minimalism's’ object hood approaches the tautological, the post-minimal alludes to an uneasy subjectivity, one which unavoidably informs its expressive make-up, if not its subject.

Aspects of the devotional extend easily into the realm of cultural activity and artifactation. Both court notions of transcendence, as well as a transubstantive quality regarding mere objects tipping miraculously ‘aesthetic’ on the fulcrum of belief. These objects are not specific semiotic propositions, in that they indicate some hidden sign-system, which contains a coded content. Every artifact begs interpretation of some kind, but these objects resist interpretation even though they are obviously ‘made’ and exist as forms just on the edge of recognizability. This does not mean there is a lack of reference, only that such overt or subconscious meaning is inevitably over written and canceled by subsequent interpretations, which are beyond the control of the objects or the artist. Without overt illustrative content to provide literary content, the works can only offer their material presence.

Excavation often produces confusion as to what might be artifacts or significant information and what is natural or accidental material. One must already have some structure or pre-disposition for analyzing what one finds, a means of determining the raw from the processed. This projection of a nature/culture metaphor imbues objects with a narrative component as well as a purely literal physicality. The location of specific meaning is often fugitive, and itself open to interpretation and re-interpretation. The process goes back and forth. The significant and the insignificant often are indistinguishable.

The works rely on a dual, contradictory essence; they allude to a ritualized context, but no particular myth. In the same way they refer to specific types of objects without being those objects. As formally reductive works they suggest, but never confirm their metaphoric associations. They hover between an identity of objects of industrial production and the elevated status given to works, which display artistic uniqueness. Such indeterminacy intentionally muddies, rather than clarifies their quantitative meaning. Such decidedly ‘hot’ theatrical, narrative allusions contrast with the ‘cool’ of the reductive vehicle. The result is these primary structures in emotive skins.

Media: Organic beeswax, natural fibers, lead, wood, graphite, granite dust

Dimension: Monument - 1 600 x 800 x 300 cm. Offerings range in size from 13 x 48 x 15 cm to 32 x 120 x 35 cm.

Sound environment, entitled "Zonule Glaes II" by composer Dennis Bathory-Kitsz

Remains II - 1997
Essay by Joseph Karoly

In his two related series of works, "Hearts and Minds" and "Remains of the Past/Remains of the Future", Pavel Kraus states that the brain is the most erogenous "zone". As a reified, it is the virtual locus for erotic propositions. These propositions encompass the notions of arousal and perversity, seduction and abandonment. The heart provides a rich history of symbolic inscription, as the metaphorical organ of concupiscence for person or place, the seat of emotional and spiritual presence. The mind acts as a filter or ordering instrument for this raw, emotive plasma. The mind imposes a matrix for psychological resonance.

For Kraus, these resonance include the use of materials which hint, strongly at a corporeal awareness of the body both haptic and tactile, as well as a psychological ambiguity of temporal displacement the conjure, whiffs of nostalgia for memory that is both "pre" and "post" industrially apocalyptic. Certain aspects of Kraus' work hints at the libidinous "Prague-of-the-Mind", where sex and death form parenthetical poles which are all activity shuttles between. Kraus espouses an aesthetic of desire, both physical and spiritual. Desire is a verb, requiring a mental transaction between the one who longs and the object of that longing. The purest longing is in one's capacity to desire, not necessarily in its attainment. To solve the mystery of Kraus' objects would be to return them to the realm of mere things, to deconsecrate them, rob them of their associative powers. Like a pornographic image or text, the works are aimed at the individual viewer, couched in a private arrangement of exchange, designed for their eyes alone. This, of course, is a fictional exchange, since the means are open to all, only the interpretation seduces privately. In a decidedly "Sadeian" proposition, whatever pleasure the viewer derives from engagement with the works, Kraus' personal capacity for amusement is the final arbiter of determining the parameters between recognition and mystery, subservience and mastery.

Specific reference is dissolved in the range of possible meanings in favor of a Surrealist gambit of uncanny juxtapositions and visual non-sequiturs. This ambiguity places the work at a crossroads of aesthetic exchange. It begs an ironic reading between familiarity and our inability to locate them precisely in our catalog of symbolic referents and meanings. These objects refer, but attempts to use them as a type of shibboleth in an ordering system are thwarted. They are only metaphors used to describe other metaphors, sign posts with multiple arrows pointing in many directions, each path revealing a set of different possibilities. The works' power is in the lure of any mystery that tease and provokes, promising to reveal in direct proportion to one's commitment to seduction.