Artist: Flora Klein
Exhibition title: Heat
Venue: Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus, Switzerland
Date: July 19 – November 19, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Kunsthaus Glarus
Flora Klein’s abstract paintings evade conceptual frameworks or direct formal references. Through a practice developed over the past several years, Klein has devised her own painterly criteria that adhere to her interests in pictorial space, its fields, the relationships between color and movement, and surface. Klein’s paintings are vivid and multilayered. Repeating across several works are recurrent patterns comprised of rounded, elongated forms in color. While the notion of pattern implies repetition–a certain system–there appears no attempt to generate order in these works: one could sense that intuition is the likely impulse behind their composition. This intuition, however, is not indiscriminate, but is one paired with process and decision. Klein’s work is articulated across specific phases, each of which are determined by carefully chosen formal and painterly gestures.
Flora Klein’s practice evolves from a tension between persistent focus and openness, between intuitive action and self-critical analysis. These opposing modes seem to be the driving force behind her work, making way for a distinctly singular authorship. It is not easy for young artists today to assert abstraction in the contemporary art system. Thus, the function of abstraction, it’s role and position within current discourses, is not specifically discussed and remains ostensibly undefined. The transfer of abstraction into language often proves to be cumbersome, whilst the most direct way of looking at a painting is, for many, also the most difficult. This is especially true of abstract painting, whereby its role within discourse and its relevance in the material world at different points in art history has remained, to varying degrees, precarious.
The exhibition Heat takes place across two rooms and is comprised of selected paintings taken from various work phases, shown together here for the first time. A stringent arrangement of individual paintings breaks up previous groupings, making accessible their respective visual languages as well as unforeseen energies that arise at the interstices of these new configurations. Kunsthaus Glarus is showing Flora Klein’s first survey exhibition in Switzerland with works dating from 2013 to 2023.
A conversation between Flora Klein, Inka Meissner, and Melanie Ohnemus will accompany the exhibition.
Flora Klein. b. 1988 in Bern, lives and works in Berlin. 2013 ECAL, Lausanne 2022 Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Heat, installation view, Kunsthaus Glarus, 2023. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Untitled, 2019. Acrylic and oil on canvas, Courtesy the artist and Lars Friedrich, Berlin. Photo: Timo Ohler
Flora Klein, Untitled, 2018. Acrylic on canvas, Collection Philara, Düsseldorf. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Untitled, 2019. Acrylic and oil on canvas, private collection, Düsseldorf. Foto: Bengt Stiller
Flora Klein, Heat, 2020. Acrylic and oil on canvas, private collection Julia Hillert, Bielefeld. Photo: Malle Madsen
Flora Klein, Parliament, 2020. Acrylic and oil on canvas, private collection Susanne and Wolf Schäbitz, Bielefeld. Photo: Malle Madsen
Flora Klein, Rotbraun und Stahl, 2013. Acrylic on canvas, Courtesy the artist. Photo: Gina Folly
Flora Klein, Additive, 2021. Acrylic and oil on canvas, private collection Stavros Efremidis, Berlin. Foto: Katja Illner
Flora Klein, Cold Summer, 2020. Acrylic and oil on canvas, collection of Eleanor and Bobby Cayre, New York. Photo: Katja Illner
Flora Klein, Untitled, 2020. Acrylic and oil on canvas, private collection Susanne and Wolf Schäbitz, Bielefeld. Photo: Katja Illner
Flora Klein, Untitled, 2022. Acrylic, oil and spray paint on canvas, Courtesy the artist, Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf and Lars Friedrich, Berlin. Photo: Timo Ohler
Flora Klein, Untitled, 2022. Acrylic, oil and spray paint on canvas, Courtesy the artist, Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf and Lars Friedrich, Berlin. Photo: Timo Ohler
Flora Klein, Silver painting (middle), 2023. Acrylic, oil and spray paint on canvas, private collection, Berlin. Photo: Timo Ohler