Press
Release
Anita Klein -
14th November to 23rd December 2006
LARGE PAINTINGS & PRINTS: Bankside
Gallery 14th November - 3rd December
SCULPTURES, PAINTINGS & WATERCOLOURS:
Boundary Gallery 14th November - 23rd December
MONOPRINTS: Advanced Graphics
The Boundary Gallery, Advanced Graphics London and the Bankside Gallery are delighted to announce major new exhibitions of work by Anita Klein. The exhibitions will run concurrently and feature new works created by the artist since her last solo shows nearly three years ago.
The subject
matter of Anita Klein's paintings and prints is a visual diary of the intimacy
of family life. There is a grand simplicity to her works,
but that is not the same as saying that they lack subtlety and ambiguity. On the contrary, they have the sort of
unselfconscious directness that comes from living and breathing art for so long
that it becomes second nature (John Russell Taylor)
Her artistic
intellect and use of humour in capturing moments such as Nige looks for the Free Toy or The Salad are a winning combination.
Perhaps the popularity of Klein's work and the reason why its everyday content
has such appeal is best summed up by herself, If I lost everything tomorrow, what I would
look back on longingly would be the ordinary moments, the things we do every day
and don't even notice how wonderful it is that we're doing them.
Klein's
influences include Japanese woodblock prints and early Renaissance muralists
such as Giotto, Piero Della Francesca and Masaccio. Like theirs, hers is an art of
stillness, of action caught and suspended in the transfiguring moment. This is
especially apparent in her the latest paintings.
She combines
printmaking and painting in her working method, making etchings, woodcuts,
lithographs and screenprints first, and using these as preparatory sketches for
her much larger oil paintings.
Klein's
use of colour and pattern, whether of a dress, leaves in the garden or tiles on
the floor are as intrinsic to the painting as the object itself. Expression
in these paintings comes from pure colour and linear division, rhythm and rhyme,
repetition and reversal: these are the geometric values of an art of
design....In her recent paintings,
Anita Klein has demonstrated an ever-growing mastery of those underlying,
essentially abstract, principles that give life to art (Mel Gooding)
The abstract element in the composition of the pictures is essential: Klein puts these grand principles of
'artistic style' to work in the transformation of the South London quotidian,
creating out of household events and holiday pleasures images of a resonant
contemporary myth of love. (Mel Gooding)
Anita Klein has
exhibited her prints and large oil paintings extensively in the
She was elected
president of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers in 2003.
A fully
illustrated 72 page book; "Anita Klein, Painter Printmaker" with an introductory
essay by Mel Gooding will be published by Five Leaves Publications in October to
coincide with the three exhibitions
in London.
For further information and images for reproduction please
contact:
Jasmin Pelham or Laura Callendar
JB Pelham PR,
Email: jasmin@jbpelhampr.com / laura@jbpelhampr.com