"Jaw from Arras 231" Drawing

Born in Heidelberg, Germany, and living and working in Vienna, Austria, Konstanze Sailer’s practice unfolds across painting, drawing, ink, and large-scale works on paper, articulated through a fluid interplay of material density and graphic precision. Rooted in the legacies of German Informel and Abstract Expressionism, and inspired by figures such as Mark Rothko, Gotthard Graubner, and the artistic school of Tiepolo’s drawing, Sailer’s work positions itself as a counterweight to figurative painting. Her work inhabits a liminal space where painterly dissolution meets the incisive line, and where abstraction remains in constant tension with the residual figure. Recurring motifs of head, countenance, skull, and portrait form the conceptual core of her oeuvre. Across monumental canvases and expansive paper works, these forms emerge as traces of presence and disappearance, articulating a sustained meditation on space, memory, and mortality. Sailer’s surfaces are sites of inscription and erasure, where the image persists as fragment, afterimage, and sedimented history. Since 2010, this inquiry has increasingly turned toward war, violence, and collective memory. Cycles such as Kiefer aus Arras (2012), Verdun (2014), and Sedan (2020) confront the visual and psychic residues of historical catastrophe, tracing how trauma is inscribed into both landscape and cultural memory. Her more recent large-scale works on paper, developed for the series "When War Returns" within the "Memory Gaps" platform, extend this investigation into the urgencies of the present, foregrounding remembrance as an active and contested space.