GLORIA KLEIN: UNBINDING UNWINDING
Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Gloria Klein Unwinding Unbinding on view at 6150 Wilshire Blvd from April 27 through June 15. This is Klein’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles and presents historic works and ephemera from the 1970s and 80s. A public reception will take place on Saturday, April 27 from 6 – 8pm.
Gloria Klein came of age in 1970s New York and played a vital role in many artist-based initiatives in SoHo and on the Lower East Side. Her paintings can be read as Minimalist, Conceptual, and systems-based, but they are also indebted to the burgeoning support for “women’s work,” the Pattern & Decoration movement, and the Criss-Cross artists.
Klein used self-developed systems and processes to experiment with color and compositions creating intricate patterns that range from completely chaotic to highly structured geometric grids and every variation in between. Slender hard-edged hatch marks of varying lengths were core to her expression. Collectively, these hundreds of intricate almost interlocking diagonals hum with musical resonance, rhythm, and unexpected incidents that result from the layering of intersecting and competing systems. Algorithmic, they read as frequencies, digital signals, or source lines of code and explore the interplay of order and disruption, formulas, and failures of the very systems she was creating to distribute color applications.
The paintings evolved from early graph paper drawings and diagrammatic diaries, where Klein’s stream of conscious writings of repeated words, names, and phrases played out on the page in overlapping diagonals and haptic structures. The exhibition features a pair of such diaries, documents of her experimentation with form, oases from her insecurities. Entries are varied and include declarations of selfhood, “I am Gloria Tonight,” sociality, “Everyone’s at the dining room table eating breakfast. Everyone’s eating breakfast except Sue. She’s sleeping, sleeping in her room alone,” and sensuality, “I wanted to hug her and feared it might be sexual. And if it were, so what.”
Life and painting for Klein were deeply intertwined; her legacy of advocacy on behalf of women and lesbian artists, such as herself, has long been excluded from the art historical canon. Her paintings are both arresting and slow burning, grabbing viewers with their complex harmonies and sense of constant movement. Based on her own mathematical system for dividing and organizing her canvases and systematically distributing colors, she arrives at a distinctive aesthetic, defiantly abstract while expressive of the complexities of life and the world. Klein imparts her boisterous paintings with emotive and rational perspective, visualizing the complexity of people and society, life’s problems, its solutions, movements, feelings, and experiences.
Gloria Klein (b. 1936, Brooklyn, NY; d. 2021) began her adult education with a BA in Economics at the Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Following which she attended the Brooklyn Museum School of Art, the Art Students League of New York, and finally in 1970 she enrolled at Hunter College where she took classes with conceptual artist Robert Barry and Robert Swain. She obtained her MA in art from Hunter College in 1973. Klein exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions throughout the 1970s and 80s and was actively involved in alternative art networks. She exhibited in A Lesbian Show (1978) curated by Harmony Hammond at 112 Green St. Workshop, contributed work for Heresies Magazine “Lesbian Art and Artists” issue (1977), curated 10 Downtown 10 Years (1977) held at MoMA PS1 in New York, and was active with the Criss-Cross Art Cooperative group. Klein exhibited her work in galleries and museums including Hunter College, New York, NY; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; P.S.1., Long Island City, NY; 112 Workshop, New York, NY; and A.I.R., New York, NY, among many others. Her last solo exhibition was in June 2021, when Christie’s, in association with April Richon Jacobs, presented her first major solo exhibition in New York.
During her lifetime, Klein was awarded several awards, including artists’ residences, scholarships, and grants such as the International Women’s Year Award (1975-76); Studio Space at Vermont Studio School, Johnson, VT (1988); Honorable Mention, Turchin Center for Visual Arts, Boone, North Carolina (2005); Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2005), and Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant (2007). Her work can be found in many private and public collections including The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, Chase Manhattan Bank, Citibank, Swiss Reinsurance Company and Texaco among others.