Annet Gelink Gallery is proud to present Scape, the second publication of Dutch painter Carla Klein (*1970, Zwolle). Scape is published on occasion of Carla Klein's solo exhibition at the Matrix space at the Berkeley Art Museum, California, which will run until November 6, 2005.
Next to the publication we are showing a series of recent paintings. They go back to snapshots made while driving across the United States earlier this year. The landscapes are emptied of any human figure. The only signifier of human presence is the occasional dashboard of a car that appears in some canvases. The spectator seems to be exposed to the vast, empty landscape of the American West. "You may come away with hundreds, even thousands of images that en masse are meant to offer some clue, some sustainable evidence, as to where you've been or, better, what it was like to not be anywhere exactly and yet feel precisely, if rather schizophrenically, located." (Johanna Burton in Scape, 2005).
Carla Klein is moving masterly between the abstract and the figurative. And she is an exceptional photographer. Her paintings derive from photographs she takes during travels and excursions. She is fascinated by the aesthetic of the photographic image which flattens a three dimensional space onto a paper surface. Klein prints the photographs herself. Carla Klein's palette of cool, watery greys, greens and blue partly derives from photographic consequences. Smudges, overexposure, white stripes on the photographic paper become part of the painting. They give the paintings an abstract appearance when in fact they are representations of the surface of the photo-print.
