David Klamen

Mark Moore Gallery is proud to present "Meta-Paintings and Remixes,” an exhibition of paintings by gallery artist, David Klamen. Marking the artist's first solo exhibition with the gallery, this recent body of work showcases Klamen’s newest paintings of paintings. In these works, the artist further investigates the nature, source, and limits of knowledge by undermining the foundation of our empirical experience: our sense of sight. In each new painting, Klamen radically re-invents famous paintings from the pre-modern and modern era, overlapping seemingly incompatible artistic visions as a metaphor for our phenomenological search for meaning.

According to Plato’s concept of forms, the world that we know through our senses often deceives us by way of subjective images. Klamen’s multi-canvas installation, “Meta-Paintings” (2013), elaborates on this concept by presenting well-known works of art in a re-contextualized space, highlighting the deception of each image through masterful illusion and imagination. In these twenty-five smaller paintings, Klamen presents an installation that playfully mimics a salon style hanging. The diagonal slopes created by the various slanting paintings suggest a cubist bas-relief that compresses art historical time periods and physical space. As is the case with nearly all of his paintings, each iconic artwork (as well as its frame, and oftentimes wall label) is meticulously rendered as a representation of a representation, moving further and further from its archetypal form—pointing to a distortion of reality already present in the original image. To further complicate the simulacrum, Klamen plays with the viewer’s perception by drastically altering the perspective of the painting, tilting the work at an oblique angle within his own canvas. In his “remixes,” Klamen manipulates images from the art historical canon by warping then into optical oscillations full of contingencies and surprises. The psychedelic result suggests a disoriented ocular state that hints at the malleable nature of our reality—a reality that relies heavily on the conviction of our individual experiences.

David Klamen (American, b.1961) earned his Bachelor's of Fine Arts at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana in 1983 and his Master's of Fine Arts in Painting at the School of the Art Institute in 1985. He is currently Chancellor’s Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University Northwest. Klamen is represented in the following public collections: the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (CA), the Museum of Contemporary Art (IL), the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (CA), and the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison (WI), De Young Museum (CA), Illinois State Museum (IL), and others.