| |
|
|
| ANITA KLEIN |
|
|
|
| applause I anita
klein ©2000/2023
|
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
And then there's the composition. The figures are artfully positioned within
the frame, instructing the viewer's eye-journey, as if planned by a
Renaissance master. Once you realise this, you sense that these modern-day
figures are akin to passers-by who've happened upon a momentous episode in
the life of Christ, as depicted by Masaccio, or Fra Filippo Lippi.
When you hear Klein talk about her practice, you realise this is no
coincidence. She studied fine art at Chelsea and the Slade, and lives
part-time in Tuscany: she is heavily influenced by the work of late-medieval
Italian frescoists.
Understand this, and you get what she's up to: Klein is transposing the
divine onto the everyday. The simple pleasures that make life worthwhile, so
fleeting, so easily forgotten, which constitute the building blocks of
family love. Moments, she points out, that went missing during lockdown.
- Alex Leith, editor of the British Art News - British Art Fair 2022
|
“No British artist has more thoroughly explored the female experience of family in the
past 30 years than Anita Klein”
- The Guardian 2015
|
I think the ability to make other people see is a wonderful definition of what art is about,
and the truth of this definition became obvious to me when I visited the private view of
Anita Klein’s new paintings at Eames Fine Art gallery in Bermondsey Street last night.
As an established and highly respected painter and printmaker, Anita Klein has her
own
very unique style and voice. Although I was impressed by both the originality of
Anita
Klein’s beautiful paintings and prints and by her technical ability this is not what
resonated
with me most. It struck me last night when observing Anita Klein’s work that
her art is both
the perfect embodiment of someone who is willing to dare greatly and to
be vulnerable.
Her ability to help us see the possibility of happiness in life’s small moments, from enjoying
the simple pleasure of a cup of tea to sharing a tender moment with loved
ones, is a
wonderful reminder of what life is really about. The value of realising that happiness is within
everyone’s grasp if only we chose to savour and appreciate what we
already have is priceless.
The ability to remind us of this fact is, in my opinion, the real talent
of Anita Klein.
- Shona Lockhart, The Happiness Experiment
|
How
refreshing, then, to encounter the art of Anita Klein.
This London based artist understands implicitly that, while art
is a product to
be made and traded, it is primarily and most importantly a way of
communication
between the artist and the public, a medium for sharing what it
means to be alive
and aware. Her work is popular, but never dumbed down, and it is
very well made.
Her paintings and prints can be understood at first viewing but,
like all good art,
become better known and more satisfying through repeated viewings...
What unites
all these works is their honesty, resulting in images that find
their place in peoples’
homes and lives, rewarding repeated viewings, and producing delight.
That is a rare
gift in the art world.
- Richard Noyce, The India Art Journal. Spring 2012
|
"Anita
Klein is one of the finest and most collected printmakers
working in Britain today. Her art is witty, charismatic, warm
and
poignant; an archive of personal moments that everyone can identify
with."
- Latest 7 Magazine 2008
|
"At
a time when the art world seems to be full of artists attempting
to
shock and denigrate, Klein’s intimate, life affirming work
comes as
a welcome breath of fresh air. Her works convey a unique pleasure
in
the everyday moments that make life special.”
- Vincent Eames, The Fine Art Partnership
|
“This
award reflects the emotional insight of Anita Klein in her observation
and understanding of intimate social, family and sexual relationships,
and
her glorious ability to bring them to paper. It celebrates her sensual
feel
for form, human curves, shapes, moods, the patterns of touch between
friends and friends – and lovers; the flow of their clothes
and naked
bodies; and the graceful optimism her paintings release into the
world.
They warm the air.”
- Best Artist award UK Fringe, Fringe Report 2007
|
“Ravel
said he wanted his music to be complex, but not complicated. Anita
Klein
might say the same of her art. There is a grand simplicity to her
works, but that is
not the same as saying they lack subtlety and ambiguity. On the
contrary, they
have the sort of unselfconscious directness that comes from living
and
breathing art for so long that it becomes second nature”
- John Russell Taylor, the Times
|
“A
strong, quirkily humorous depiction of quotidian events”
- Nick Andrew, Galleries magazine
|
“The
pictures, which celebrate the small moments of life which often
go
unappreciated, are warm, witty and quite delightful”
- Julia Weiner, Jewish Chronicle
|
“It
is quite brave not only to have a subject matter to your painting
these days
but also to be fascinated by such ordinary things. There are no
desperate
attempts to shock, expose or outrage; simply poignant moments showing
the
things which you would most miss if they were taken away from you.”
- Helen Smithson, Ham & High.
|
“Celebrating
oases of joy in the quotidian, Anita Klein builds a personal archive,
brimming with charisma and wit, that can be identified with by everyone.”
- Britart.com
|
“It
is nice to have a real humorist recruited to the ranks of gifted
painters.
She is to be congratulated on livening up our dreary lives.”
- Guy Burn, Art Review.
|
“Star
of the show for me is the spare, knowing, subversive and comic work
of a
young painter called Anita Klein.”
- Godfrey Smith, Sunday Times
|
“A
blithe demonstration of intimacy”
- William Zimmer, New York Times
|
"She
is an artist of extraordinary verve and lyrical touch...These images
are
mirrors of a resonant delight in the moment, an exhuberant and infectious
love
of life.Unfashionable as it is, Anita Klein’s work actually
makes us happy."
- David Carpanini, PRE
|
“Anita
Klein renders the ordinary existence into a celebration of
life - mostly
based on her family. Her style is remarkably and unmistakably individual
- her
brilliant palette (based on her Australian childhood?), great
compositions and
draughtsmanship (hardly to be attributed to the Slade - when she
studied there,
figurative art was out of favour) all reveal a highly committed
and uncompromising artist.”
- Agi Katz Boundary Gallery London
|
‘I
know she’s got a quirky scale and that the figures are larger
than life,’ says
Jenny Groom, owner of a cookery school in Wiltshire, who bought
one of Anita
Klein’s oil paintings five years ago, ‘but it just accentuates
their personality.
The painting I have is called "Tuesday Evening", and it
shows two women sitting
across the table from one another, each holding a glass of wine.
You just know
they’ve got rid of their husbands and the kids are in bed
and they’re having a
good gossip, and it makes me laugh every time I look at it. She
observes the
minutiae of family life - the little things we do that are important
to us.
If my house was burning down, this is what I’d save.’
- (Quoted in the Telegraph Magazine 2004 )
|
“Those
values of disegno - line and division, pure colour planes, formal
pattern and
interval - are those of the great mural painting of the early renaissance
- the art of
Giotto, Piero della Francesco and Masaccio - that Klein reveres
above all others,
and to which she has paid the closest attention. Like theirs, hers
is an art of stillness,
of action caught and suspended in the transfiguring moment.... These
are the elements
of abstract style, the components of the formal economy to which
I referred at the outset.
They are to be found ... in the quattrocento modernism that placed
such revolutionary
value upon the depiction of ordinary men and women in extraordinary
circumstances,
conferring dignity upon them by abstract formalities of figuration
and placement.
Klein puts these grand principles of ‘artistic style’
to work in the transformation
of the South London quotidian, creating out of household events
and holiday pleasures
images of a resonant contemporary myth of love.”
- Mel Gooding April 2006
|
|