| DAVID KLAMEN “Joy” 1998 Ink and Watercolor on Paper 8.5”x 11” (image size) Approx 15.5” x 18” (framed) Collection of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art |
Mark Moore Fine Art and the artist are pleased to announce the acquisition of a major work by artist JOSH AZZARELLA by The Crocker Art Museum. David Klamen (American, b.1961) is a contemporary painter whose work grows in conjunction with his interest in philosophy and scholarship, centralized around the questions,”How do I know what I know?” and “How do I know myself?” Klamen paints figuratively and abstractly, sometimes combining the two by incorporating geometric lines or patterns atop his high finished landscapes. Says Paul Gray of Richard Gray Gallery, “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, 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 contrast to the tradition of artists creating works informed by a consistent visual language, David Klamen’ watercolors (like the one here) 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 to investigate the question of how we know our culture and ourselves. His current paintings and drawings 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 his 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. Beginning each work with paper that is saturated with an even black layer of graphite. Klamen slowly reveals the imagery by erasing the highlights, uncovering and discovering the nuances of his memory from the depths of the graphite surface. 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 many of these 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 memories with the present moment. 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 Chazen 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. Klamen earned his Bachelors of Fine Arts at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, and his Masters of Fine Arts in Painting at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. As one of the leading art museums on the West Coast, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art serves a diverse audience of approximately 70,000 people annually. The Museum offers a wide variety of educational and interpretive programs to this broad audience. Our 75-member Docent Council provides over 800 gallery tours and slide talks annually. The Museum’s collection of the arts of Asia, Europe, and the Americas includes paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, ceramics, glass, jades, bronzes, lacquer, and textiles. The broad areas in which SBMA holds a significant number of works of exceptional quality include international antiquities from China, India, Greece, Rome, Egypt, and the Near East and 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century art from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Particular strengths of the collection are 19th- and 20th-century American and European art, contemporary American painting, photography, and the arts of Asia, especially China. |
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