Having mounted successful photography exhibitions in galleries and museums worldwide, Eric Klemm’s new body of work finds him dissolving a lifetime of art practice in order to rebuild it as he goes. His latest series of paintings are ideas of art at play with themselves, canvasses depicting a serial exploration of form and colour’s potential. The paintings work from an abstract structural starting point from which bands of colour seek their sense of balance as a composition. Within this framework, Klemm is able to address the question of abstraction autonomously, rather than contend with the question of representing reality.
At first glance, Klemm’s paintings register the hard edged abstract minimalism of Josef Albers or Frank Stella. The surfaces of his paintings, conveying a bold flatness of colour and simplicity of shape, are a nod to the modernist trajectory of abstract painting as a whole. Klemm’s summations and elaborations on that history carry forward this persistent visual language that continues to sustain painting today as a medium of immediacy, playfulness and possibility.