The gallery is pleased to share Annabel Osberg‘s review of David Klamen‘s current solo exhibition at the gallery! The full article discusses the works at length, here are a few key excerpts:
“Klamen works from the inside out: in copying an artwork with his own hand, he positions himself between his viewer and the depicted painting. In Struth’s photos, each painting is mediated by the camera and by the depicted viewers standing between the painting and the camera lens. Klamen’s paintings are more spatiotemporally disorienting because they present the viewer directly with a picture in the same medium as the depicted artwork: the viewer has the rather uncomfortable feeling of being a participant in the painterly recontextualization, not just a bystander…”
“When paintings become canonized in museums and art history books, they are effectively placed on a linear timeline subclassified by categories of movement and style. Klamen pulls paintings off the continuum and flattens them all onto the same plane into a new curatorial state, promoting new associations between them. Taken as a whole, Klamen’s entire show operates in much the same way as this single work…”
“In Klamen’s hands, art history is a pliable tool, an inexhaustible resource for creating new meanings. Few artists possess his ability to appropriate others’ work with such deadpan conspicuity and arrive at such inspiring results.”
The author also makes mention of the accompanying solo exhibition of paintings and collages by Joseph Hart:
“In the room adjacent to Klamen’s show is a concurrent exhibition by Joseph Hart, a New York-based artist engaged with art history in interesting contrast to Klamen. Hart’s paintings and collages vibrate with expressive lines and colorful snippets of paper in compositions reminiscent of Twombly, Kandinsky, and even Miro. The title of his show, “KISS IDIOMS,” bespeaks Hart’s autobiographical painterly language. In his collages, he juxtaposes idiosyncratic marks with bits and pieces of cut paper, paint chips, and fabric. Many of these collaged scraps are of personal significance to him: they are pieces of his work pants, his daughter’s stickers, studio detritus, scraps of deconstructed drawings. The result is engagingly diaristic and lyrical.”
David Klamen, Meta-Paintings 2, 2013. Oil on multiple canvases, 90 x 135 inches.
Joseph Hart,Untitled (K.I.04), 2014. Collaged paper, work pants, acrylic, oil crayon and graphite on paper, 50 x 38 inches.
See both exhibitions before they close on Saturday, June 21!
Mark Moore Fine Art Blog 