Claudia Mann

Central to the artist’s work is the investigation of absence as an active and effective force. Absence is not understood as a void, but as a condition of perception, meaning, and spatial experience. From this perspective, the artist develops a sculptural practice in which the ground is not conceived as a mere support, but as an active component of the work.

Absence First. is a floor cast which, when moved toward the artist’s face, could be raised up—a corporeal funnel that looks back.

The artist does not understand this appropriation as an act of possession, but as a form of physical and inner contact. Absence First. produces non-presence as the condition of its own existence. A central component of the artist’s practice is casting as a sculptural method, understood not as reproduction, but as an encounter with material, site, and time. Here, non-presence plays a guiding role: negative and positive form.

Claudia Mann (born in Wuppertal in 1982) is a sculptor living in Düsseldorf and Korschenbroich. After studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy (master student of Prof. Didier Vermeiren), she focused on the relationship between sculpture and earth, often incorporating absence, traces, and geological materials. She received the Lothar Fischer Prize in 2023.