Ivory Black, Deep Orange Yellow | Carla Klein

‘space that exists, but that you cannot reach' as described by Carla Klein. Anyone standing in front of the paintings undergoes a similar experience. In a virtuosic, figurative style, the spatiality of a landscape or city is evoked, in which you, as a viewer, want to be absorbed. But at the same time, there is the reality of the material, and this contradicts the illusion. The eye is confronted with a membrane of paint. Smudges caused by rubbing the paint and streaks of paint drips float above the illusion of the realistic landscape like an abstract layer. The painting carries multiple realities, they exist alongside each other, in each other. - Jannie Regnerus

Carla Klein (b. 1970) lives and works in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She studied at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (1988-1993) and later completed a residency at the Rijkskademie in Amsterdam (1994-1995). For three decades, Klein has explored the relationship between digital and analogue photography and painting as well as the layers of mediation involved in both creating and interpreting images. Using her own photography as a point of departure, Klein’s paintings push the original image towards abstraction in ways that reveal inherent flaws in processes of representation. Enlarged from negative to snapshot, and from snapshot to canvas, her sublime landscapes become real objects, far enough removed from their subjects that they take on new and different meanings. Klein is represented by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York | Los Angeles (US) and Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam (NL). Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, California (US); Miami Art Museum, Florida (US); National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C (US); Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia (US); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (NL); Museum MORE, Gorssel (NL); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (NL); Schunck Museum, Heerlen (NL); Dordrechts Museum (NL); and Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Hague (NL). 

Jannie Regnerus (b. 1971) is a writer and visual artist. After a working period at the Rijksakademie, she had exhibitions in Amsterdam, Paris and Tokyo. As a writer, she made her debut with books about her long stays in Mongolia and Japan, and subsequently wrote four novels.