There are artists who arrive at painting as if born to it, and others who find their way through accident, necessity, or revelation. Erna Klaus belongs to the latter, those whose encounter with art comes not as predestination but as destiny realized late, ripened by the weight of lived experience. Her practice, now internationally acclaimed, was not formed in the academies of youth but in the reflective silence of a second life. The “late calling” of Klaus, as she herself describes it, carries with it an extraordinary maturity: a vision free of anxiety to belong, a confidence to let painting unfold as process rather than performance. Her oeuvre, ranging from meditative figuration to abstract expressivity, emerges as a luminous dialogue between interior stillness and spontaneous gesture. What defines Klaus’s work is not a single aesthetic lineage but an internal coherence: a fidelity to the unplanned, to the organic rhythm of emergence. In this way, her art stands in kinship with the philosophies of intuition and chance that guided artists from Joan Miró to Per Kirkeby, though Klaus transforms these impulses into a language unmistakably her own.

In Buddha von Leshan (2019), acrylic on canvas, Klaus presents one of her most overtly representational works, a serene visage that rises from a textured landscape of ochres, greens, and celestial blue. The monumental face of the Buddha, rendered with softened planes and closed eyes, is not a portrait of divinity but an evocation of stillness itself. The surrounding colors, mossy greens merging into the rust of earth, seem to breathe around the figure, as if the natural world were meditating with it. Klaus’s brushwork oscillates between clarity and dissolution. The face is defined yet porous, as if painted by time rather than hand. The work’s spiritual force lies in its restraint: no didactic symbolism, no decorative flourish. Instead, we sense what the artist herself calls her “dialogue between inner stillness and spontaneous gesture.” This is painting as meditation, each layer a breath, each color an exhalation. The composition recalls not so much Buddhist iconography as the phenomenology of silence: an image that does not speak but listens. One might think here of Paul Klee’s dictum that art “does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.” Klaus’s Buddha von Leshan does precisely that it makes visible the invisible act of contemplation.

In Count Down (2018), executed in charcoal on wood, Klaus stands at a pivotal point in her transition from figuration to abstraction. The medium charcoal, raw and immediate, allows her to trace a syntax of gesture closer to drawing than painting. Lines intersect, collide, and loop into rhythmic geometries that seem to pulse with anxious vitality. The title itself, Count Down, suggests both urgency and inevitability, a temporal metaphor for process. We witness the artist negotiating between structure and entropy. The linear vocabulary evokes the restless energy of early European abstraction, yet the marks resist pure formalism. They are charged with a personal tension a visual transcription of inner time. In the black and white field, Klaus strips painting of color’s emotional safety, confronting the viewer with raw mark-making. The surface becomes a score of controlled chaos, echoing the existential drawing of Karel Appel or even the psychic automatism of early Surrealism. Yet Klaus’s marks are not automatic; they are meditative acts of release. Each stroke counts down to stillness, not explosion.

In Flying Corset (2017), a mixed-media work from an earlier phase, color reenters Klaus’s vocabulary, luminous yellows, subtle blacks, and a dynamic interplay between opacity and transparency. The composition suggests the trace of motion, a dance between the anchored and the airborne. The title tempts metaphor: the corset, symbol of containment, now liberated through flight. This paradox encapsulates Klaus’s artistic ethos—the tension between discipline and freedom, between the constructed and the spontaneous. Her surfaces often appear as palimpsests, where past gestures remain visible beneath new ones. Here, movement and stillness coexist, as though the painting itself were breathing. This piece signals the beginning of Klaus’s lifelong dialogue with process. The composition is less about representation than revelation of what emerges when the artist ceases to control and begins to listen.

In Stonehenge (2024), Klaus transforms one of humanity’s most ancient monuments into an exploration of structure, texture, and time. Thick strokes of brown and ochre stand upright against a vivid, almost Fauvist sky. The image hovers between abstraction and symbol: the megaliths reduced to painterly gestures, the landscape dissolving into memory. What makes Stonehenge remarkable is its treatment of materiality. The paint feels sculptural—an echo of stone rendered fluid. The brushwork retains the muscularity of action painting, yet the chromatic harmony recalls the spiritual serenity of landscape. In this equilibrium between matter and immateriality, Klaus touches the essence of her art: painting as both construction and meditation. There is in Stonehenge a quiet defiance of temporality. The ancient monument, fixed in earth for millennia, becomes in her hands a gesture of impermanence, a painted surface that might vanish with a single wash of light. Through this, Klaus reimagines history as a process rather than permanence.

Caught (2018) is one of Klaus’s most narrative abstractions. We discern a fishlike form ensnared amid vertical strands of algae, rendered in layered washes of blue and green. It is as if we are submerged with the subject, within the thick quiet of water where sound is replaced by color. The painting captures both motion and entrapment, freedom and constraint. The fish, with its open mouth and curved body, becomes a metaphor for the artist herself—caught within the currents of creation, struggling toward expression. Klaus’s underwater world is not one of danger but of revelation: a space where light diffuses, where form dissolves into energy. In the tradition of painters who explore the liquidity of perception—from Turner’s atmospheric seas to Helen Frankenthaler’s poured veils—Klaus reclaims fluidity as both an aesthetic and a philosophical category. To be “caught” in her sense is not to be trapped, but to be fully present to be held by the moment of painting itself.

Contacts (2019) marks Klaus’s deepening into pure abstraction. The painting is a choreography of color: viridian greens, cerulean blues, flashes of crimson. Forms do not represent but resonate. The title evokes a connection between shapes, between colors, between the painter and the viewer. Here, Klaus’s compositional strategy approaches that of musical improvisation. Broad sweeps of paint alternate with precise accents, producing rhythm rather than narrative. Her gestures no longer describe but invoke; they speak in the syntax of emotion, not object. What distinguishes Klaus’s abstraction is its refusal of cold geometry. Her forms remain organic, porous, and alive. The painting breathes as a living field. This sensitivity to the vitality of color places her in conversation with the lyrical abstraction of Hans Hartung and the sensuality of Kandinsky’s later works. Yet Klaus’s tone is gentler, more introspective, an abstraction not of intellect, but of soul.

At once explosive and controlled, Foresight (2022) exemplifies Klaus’s mature style. A storm of yellow, crimson, and white bursts across the canvas, colliding and dissolving in an almost cosmic energy. The title implies vision, seeing ahead, sensing the future, and indeed, the painting feels prophetic. Klaus constructs her compositions through layering and erasure. Beneath the vibrant surface lies an archaeology of gesture, traces of past decisions, remnants of doubt and certainty. This process-driven approach situates her within the contemporary lineage of painterly abstraction, yet her aim is not formal innovation but existential resonance. In Foresight, color becomes force. The reds and yellows are not mere pigments but energy fields of consciousness. The work resonates with a spiritual urgency reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s late canvases, though Klaus’s tone is more luminous, less tragic. She paints not to mourn the void but to illuminate it.

Few works in Klaus’s oeuvre embody the sublime as powerfully as High Waves (2023). The canvas surges with the motion of oceanic energy: thick impastos of white cresting against the deep blues of storm-tossed water. Here, abstraction and representation collapse into one another—the wave as both subject and gesture. This painting recalls the Romantic tradition of the sea as a metaphor for human consciousness, the infinite depth of emotion and thought. Yet Klaus reframes this tradition for a contemporary sensibility. Her waves are not catastrophic but contemplative; they embody the tension between chaos and serenity that defines her art. The physicality of the brushwork, its rhythm and direction, suggests an almost musical cadence. Each stroke is a measure of the artist’s pulse, an embodiment of her meditative state. The result is both dramatic and tranquil, a vision of nature as inner landscape.

If Buddha von Leshan captures the stillness of contemplation, The Enlightened One (2022) dramatizes the awakening that follows. The human figure painted in searing oranges and reds, emerging from a glowing field of yellow, seems both corporeal and ethereal. The gaze is direct yet inward, suspended between awareness and transcendence. The use of color here is extraordinary. Klaus harnesses chromatic intensity not as decoration but as illumination. The reds blaze with spiritual heat; the yellows radiate inner light. The composition pulses with energy, yet remains grounded in the human. This work stands at the intersection of figuration and abstraction, the sacred and the psychological. Klaus transforms enlightenment into an event of painting a visible transfiguration. It is, in many ways, the culmination of her spiritual trajectory: from the meditative calm of Buddha von Leshan to the fiery awakening of The Enlightened One.

In World of Animals (2019), Klaus revisits the representational impulse but filters it through abstraction. A submerged creature, perhaps a barracuda or a primordial fish, moves through vegetal forms rendered with transparency and texture. The scene vibrates with life—a meditation on the coexistence of species, the silent communication of nature. Klaus paints nature not as spectacle but as communion. Her ecological sensibility is intuitive, not didactic. The underwater setting becomes a metaphor for empathy: to see the world through other eyes, to inhabit other rhythms. This work resonates with contemporary ecological thought, positioning Klaus among artists who explore the fragile harmony between humanity and the environment. Yet her message is not activist but contemplative; she paints the sacredness of coexistence rather than the tragedy of loss.

Erna Klaus’s art resists classification. She moves effortlessly between abstraction and figuration, between meditative silence and gestural vitality. What unites her work is an unwavering authenticity—a refusal to conform to the market’s demand for repetition. Each painting is an act of discovery, not production. Her biography reinforces this integrity. Coming to art after a full professional life, Klaus embodies what might be called the “second modernity” of creation: the phase in which art is no longer ambition but necessity. From her first intuitive oil painting in Munich to her current studies at Markus Lüpertz’s Summer Academy, her path has been guided not by careerism but by devotion. Her exhibitions at venues from Vienna to Tokyo, Stockholm to Miami testify to an artist who has quietly built an international presence. Her awards, including the World of Art Award – Artist of the Year 2023 and multiple Leonardo da Vinci Prizes in Milan, confirm what her paintings already proclaim: that late beginnings can yield timeless visions.

Philosophically, Klaus’s work stands as a meditation on transformation.

Her paintings do not depict change; they enact it. They emerge from process, from the acceptance of impermanence. In this sense, she shares an affinity with the thought of Wassily Kandinsky, the belief that painting can be a conduit for the spiritual in art. But where Kandinsky sought cosmic harmony, Klaus seeks inner balance. Her abstraction is not metaphysical but human, rooted in the breath and silence of lived experience. In the context of contemporary art, where irony and conceptualism often dominate, Klaus’s sincerity is radical. She restores to painting a sense of wonder, of reverence for the act itself.

Her canvases invite slowness, an antidote to the velocity of the digital image. To stand before a work by Erna Klaus is to enter a temporal suspension, where gesture becomes meditation and color becomes consciousness. The late calling of Erna Klaus, then, is not an accident of biography but a metaphor for art itself: it reminds us that creation is always possible, renewal near. Her works, whether the contemplative silence of Buddha von Leshan, the explosive luminosity of Foresight, or the serene turbulence of High Waves, speak a universal language: that beauty is not in perfection, but in becoming.

Erna Klaus paints as one who listens to silence, to color, to the slow unfolding of form. In doing so, she reaffirms painting’s most essential truth: that the canvas is not a mirror of the world, but a field where the world is rediscovered anew.

By Marta Puig

Editor Contemporary Art Curator Magazine