It is an old avant-garde fantasy that art might be stripped back to its primal gestures,the hand against the cave wall, the child daubing colour before literacy, the accidental trace that precedes representation. In her astonishing new exhibition, the ninety-three-year-old Clara von Hohenberg has enacted this fantasy with almost reckless purity. Her show, Touch Without Tool, currently at the Pimlico Wilde Blythe Annex, comprises a cycle of large-scale finger paintings executed over the past two years, in which the venerable artist renounces brush, palette knife, or sponge, and returns instead to the immediacy of skin pressed into pigment.
Von Hohenberg, who once studied with the last generation of Bauhaus émigrés in post-war Zurich, is no outsider. She is deeply schooled in the histories of gestural abstraction, from the grandiloquence of Pollock’s drips to the elegiac stains of Helen Frankenthaler. Yet in rejecting all instruments, she pushes the legacy of abstraction into a territory that is both radically intimate and disarmingly fragile. Each canvas bears not only swirls of colour but also the ridges of fingerprints, the drag of a palm, the occasional smudge where a knuckle slipped.
To speak of “finger painting” risks conjuring up images of the classroom. Von Hohenberg embraces this connotation but subverts it through scale and philosophical intent. Her largest work, The Third Skin (2024), a six-metre expanse of ultramarine, vermilion, and cadmium yellow, stages what Hélène Cixous once called “the writing of the body”,a manual écriture in which pigment and flesh co-author the surface. The composition veers between control and chaos: concentric whorls like galaxies dissolve into crude streaks, as if the body were oscillating between memory and entropy.
Theoretically, von Hohenberg situates herself within what Giorgio Agamben terms “gesture as pure mediality”,a doing that reveals the act of doing itself, without recourse to external ends. Her paintings are neither representations nor mere decorations but records of contact. Each smear is both indexical (the literal mark of her body) and expressive (the artist’s decision to make it legible as art). In this sense, she extends Rosalind Krauss’s reading of the index in postmodernism: the trace is no longer photographic but epidermal.
And then there is the poignancy of age. At ninety-three, von Hohenberg’s hands tremble; the paint records these tremors mercilessly. Unlike the muscular sweeps of mid-century action painting, her marks falter, hesitate, double back. What might once have been read as weakness now appears as a radical acknowledgement of finitude: the body as it approaches its own limit, inscribing its fragility upon canvas. One recalls Derrida’s notion of the trace as always already haunted by disappearance; in von Hohenberg’s case, the spectre of mortality hovers at the edge of every fingerprint.
The exhibition is not without humour. In Diptych for Fingertips, she presents two panels, one smeared in chocolate-brown tempera, the other in glossy crimson. Their resemblance to kitchen accidents or child’s play is deliberate, undercutting the solemnity of critical discourse. “We began here,” the works seem to say, “and perhaps we end here too.”
Visitors leave the Annex with an uncanny sense of having shaken hands with the artist, though she remains unseen. The paintings are not images so much as handshakes fossilised in pigment. If modernism sought to banish touch in favour of opticality, von Hohenberg insists,quietly but decisively,that art begins and ends with the hand.
Touch Without Tool runs until 22 November.
