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Carlfriedrich Claus (1930–1998) was an East German visual artist and poet, who called himself an “existence experimenter.”
His work functioned between visual and sound poetry and consisted of vocal articulations recorded on tapes he referred to as Lautprozesse (sound processes) as well as drawn Sprachblätter (speech sheets). Claus’s work was exhibited in exhibitions from the 1960s on, including Schrift und Bild, Baden Baden and Amsterdam, 1963, and—though he was suspected and monitored by the regime—the official German Democratic Republic exhibition Malerei und Grafik, Paris, 1981, as well as Carlfriedrich Claus. Erwachen am Augenblick, Karl- Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz), Munster, Hamburg, and Berlin (among others), 1990–1991. However, Claus’s real fame grew after the political changes in 1990,and he was artistically active till his death eight years later. He was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Cross of Merit) in 1997, and received a commission for a permanent work for the Reichstag, Berlin, in 1998. Claus lived and worked at Annaberg and Chemnitz.
