New Art Examiner
September, 1999
Chicago Cultural Center
Fassbender Gallery

Vera Klement
Retrospective Exhibition
by Claire Wolf Krantz

 

Vera Klement's retrospective exhibit of paintings at the Chicago Cultural Center, thoughtfully curated by Gregory G. Knight, summed up 33 years of her endeavor to combine emotional, intellectual, and biographical material with formal investigation. Her primary subject matter is herself in relationship to an alienating, often hostile world, and to death. Her paintings are generally composed of several white, flatly gessoed, asymmetrical canvases on which she balances unrelated images in an unusual format that suggests drawing on paper‑the disparate, juxtaposed images that one finds in a sketchbook. Loosely painted Images, used over and over again in different arrangements, may include a figure, a vessel, or a fragment of landscape. These are juxtaposed with flatly painted geometric areas suggesting segments of architecture or allusions to Modernism. A consistent white ground forms the silent place where all the noisy elements are tangentially joined.

As Klement's complex formal vocabulary and signature style develops, the elements of both figuration and abstraction are continually refined and combined and a tension develops between luscious paint application and thinner, flat areas. Woman at Window  from 1965, created shortly after her move from New York to Chicago, is an image of an alienated, lonely, angst‑ridden woman looking out at the world from inside a room. A yellow square painted on a wall is ambiguous in meaning and prefigures the geometric elements in later paintings. The emotions implied by Klement's figures can be related to her own experiences of traumatic separations: first from the Poland of her birth, and later from the High Modernist, intellectual milieu of New York City. Other early abstract works contain flat shapes referring to both geometry and the forms of industrial buildings.

A 1988 diptych, Green Fields/ Red Spots, is typical of her mature style. Two adjacent canvases contain different messages: on the left‑hand panel is an expressionistically painted woman's torso isolated on a white background. Thin to the point of emaciation, her skin is black, her distended belly red‑orange, and her hands blue with red stigmata staining upended palms. She is a figure of suffering and sacrifice, of death surrounded by the life symbolized by the contrasting, exuberant landscape of the right‑hand panel. On it, lushly painted green, plowed fields sharply converge on a central perspective point at the horizon. But the seemingly endless furrows are constrained in the foreground by barriers of painted wood beams and a white border. Below the woman is a flat, white shape, a metaphor for Modernism and culture, subsuming both the emblems of life and suffering into its authority.

Other narratives referring to personal, domestic, or cultural constraints include paintings of swimmers who seem to be yearning for freedom and are held back by water. The act of living seems to be a process of swimming through a heavy, repressive substance. Other paintings confront pain and death, particularly those referring to the works of favorite poets such as Paul Celan and Osip Mandelstam. Klement has translated some of their poems and occasionally includes them in her exhibitions. In Portraitl/Mandelstam #2, a black bird seems to be flying out of the poet's heart. The bird flies free, but its exit has left an opening, a wound in the poet's chest.

Klement's sense of balance between her paintings' segments and their figure‑ground relationships, as well as her attention to borders and the grid bring to mind the Japanese influence on Modernism, the paintings of Piet Mondrian and Robert Ryman, and even the architecture of Mies Van Der Rohe. Klement incorporates these emblems of Modernism into her figurative, narrative panels.

Thus, by carefully arranging her beautifully painted bits and pieces, Klement constructs ambiguous meanings for her works. What are we to make of the tightly controlled pieces of landscape that are painted so lushly and freely, filled with the juices of life and artistic freedom? Do Klement's anguished, isolated figures stand for a contemporary world that contains and constrains but gives no shelter? Is the optimism, the sensuality of nature so removed, so foreign now that it can only be observed from a distance, no longer an integral part of our own natures? And are the fragments from a sketchbook closer to the actuality of a lived life than the traditionally composed painting, resolved and frozen in time?

Klement's most recent works were concurrently exhibited In "Fusion: New Paintings" at the Fassbender Gallery. In Omro Sunset from 1999, she expresses in color and light the feelings associated with sunset and its association with the twilight of life. Here, abstraction and figuration are frankly and vigorously pursued as both aspects of the same entity. Divided into two sections, the top square is abstract, although it evokes golden sunlight bouncing off water. The bottom, horizontal panel of plowed fields is now mainly black, the furrows ending in sharp perspective at the horizon in a glowing band of yellow and green, colors which, on closer inspection, dot the dark fields as well. No longer characterized by large sections of white, this piece seems more integrated and comfortable in its abstract inquiry into life forces in the face of death.

I intuitively and cognitively respond to the mystery and emotional content of Klement's images and their strange juxtapositions, and am seduced by her painterly virtuosity and compositional inventiveness. But my greatest pleasure is the opportunity to travel with Klement's paintings through time, and to trace how she has invented and developed the means to depict the existential issues of her life.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.