David Klamen: Landscapes
An Exclusive ARTSY Online Exhibition Opening Thursday
View these works now at: https://bit.ly/3chbFEc
Mark Moore Fine Art is pleased to present an exclusive ARTSY online exhibition of five new landscape works by acclaimed artist DAVID KLAMEN. These new works on paper continues Klamen’s exploration of work centered on his interest in philosophy and scholarship.
In contrast to the tradition of artists creating works informed by a consistent visual language, David Klamen embraces an aesthetic diversity that is directed instead by an exploration of an expanding idea. In recent years, the scale of his work has shifted from tiny to larger than life, the imagery from pictorial to digital abstraction, and the tone from the silent to the aggressive, yet in each there is a common commitment. All of these works use various visual images and processes in order to investigate the question of how we know our culture and ourselves. His current paintings test epistemological strategies as diverse as OP Art (and its implication that knowledge may be a purely retinal experience), empiricism (the idea that the sole source of knowledge is direct quantifiable experience), introspection, memory, and others. In this investigation, Klamen plays with the history of art, utilizing modern and pre-modern conventions as metaphors for our communal search for meaning.
In this recent body of landscape-based work, Klamen examines the veracity of his memories, creating images based upon the distant recollections of his surrounding childhood environment. These quiet, humid, existential spaces share a familiarity that emerges from the accumulated embodied experiences of his past. Each work celebrates and solidifies a fleeting facet of his prior experience. In one painting, Klamen overlaps the image with an investigation into an eastern method for acquiring wisdom. In Nichiren Buddhism there is a belief that enlightenment can be reached through repetitive chanting, referred to as “daimoku.” In this work, and a number of earlier paintings, Klamen paints a small dab of white paint as a physical record of a chanted Buddhist prayer, recording his repetitive act of chanting while painting to seek enlightenment. Each white dot engages him in an exercise of focused contemplation until a familiar image from his memory becomes activated with a unified surface of dots that create their own structured patterns. The resulting work overlaps the painted memory of an absent external landscape with a physical record of his internal meditative search for wisdom and affirmation of the present moment.
In other works, Klamen incorporates geometric tubes or patterns that float atop his highly refined landscapes. These contrast the sensuous memory of his embodied experience in the landscape with a present and vivid abstract element, overlapping two seemingly incompatible planes of cognition.The results are meditative and quiet, engaging the audience with deep tonal values and extreme control. They ask the viewer to look more than once into the complexity of each work and encourage a shared comparison of our past memories with the present moment.
Detail Image
Klamen earned his Bachelor’s of Fine Arts at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, and his Master’s of Fine Arts in Painting at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Klamen’s work has been exhibited in international-level solo and group exhibitions across the US, Europe and Asia. His works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Elvehjem Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin; The Berkeley Museum of Art in California; The Illinois State Museum, Springfield; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; and the McNay Museum, San Antonio.
For additional information, please visit our website or contact us at: info@markmoorefineart.com
http://www.markmoorefineart.com
#artist #art #modernart #contemporaryart #dailyart #instaart #instagood #contemporaryartist #kunst #artcollectors #artcollector #artconsultant #abstractartist #painting #markmoorefineart #davidklamen #landscapes
Mark Moore Fine Art Blog 