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.