Carla Klein: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present Carla Klein’s third solo exhibition of new paintings with the gallery. Comprised of several large-scale paintings, each realized in the artist’s azure green liquid palette, Klein's paintings feature dynamic compositions based upon anonymous passageways, architectural structures and landscapes. Abstraction and hyper-realism are fused, as painterly brushstrokes precisely represent liquid skyscapes and the watery depths of a swimming pool and sharp flat geometric planes double as artifacts from digital image transfers. Conceptually, they blur the border between painting and photography as Klein puts forth images that straddle the worlds of reality and fiction.
At once expressionistic and emotionless, the works are primarily devoid of the figure, or any clear living presence, yet the paintings reflect artifacts of life and movement. Images of the sky, swimming pools, stairs, airplane landing strips, and nighttime Nordic landscapes reference transit and motion. The paintings thus represent the ‘non-place’, points of departure, or concepts of form, that become filtered through the abstract construction of the artist’s brushwork. This transition leads the work into a dynamic realm of suggested subject matter that includes fantasy and science fiction. But the images more directly reflect the artist’s own photographic sources, and as one moves from painting to painting, the group can be nearly be read as a travelogue – an existential journey wherein end points become irrelevant.
