At the center of Klaus Mosettig’s work is a series of large-scale pencil drawings based on photographs of a table surface from a Greek reception center for refugees.

The table, used by harbor police to take fingerprints of new arrivals from Turkey, is marked by ink stains—traces left unintentionally by both the officers and the refugees.

The photographs were taken by Vienna-based art historian Catharina Kahane during her humanitarian work on the island of Leros and later sent to the artist. Rather than interpreting or altering the image, Mosettig meticulously reproduces the surface, focusing on the act of rendering as a quiet, meditative gesture. In doing so, he effaces himself as author, allowing the drawing to emerge from a process of patient observation and repetition.

What results is a work poised between document and abstraction—a surface that evokes gestural painting while bearing witness to a political and human reality. Mosettig’s drawings offer a visual condensation of crisis without spectacle, making visible the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of a site that would otherwise remain at the margins of cultural attention.