ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sabina Klein is a painter and an accomplished printmaker.  By working with both media and combining them together she creates an emotional content and a story within a piece of work. The way paint can create greater depth on one hand and narrow that distance on another is integral to her signature interplay of representational and abstraction in her imagery.

She studied with S. W. Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris where she learned that a plate surface could be sculptured and played with to influence the formation or development of her image to create certain effects. She collaborated and worked with many artists, Krishna Reddy, Louise Nevelson, Al Held, Peter Milton, Larry Zox and Richard Haas among others. She taught for several years at Parsons School of Art and Design and the New School for Social Research. Her studio is located in Chelsea, on the west side of Manhattan. Her works are included in the collections of The Flint Museum of Art, The Housatonic Museum of Art and The New York Historical Society. 

THE TURNING WORLD

Printed in the artist's 2019 catalog published by Long-Sharp Gallery

Playing hide and seek with the viewer, Sabina Klein’s gorgeously colored, full-spectrum paintings are densely packed with a trove of shapes and images, with scarves and swirls of gauzy hues, curtaining darker shades and other figures beneath, their surfaces smooth in areas, smudged and gritty in others. Layers of space seem to shift as you look, like tectonic plates cracking open as creatures both mysterious and mundane fly out from her works fathomless depths. Are they mythological beasts? Apparitions? Or are they more familiar mammals, fish, fowl, and humans, transmogrified? All these images and colors are tossed about in free-fall, in free association, as if spin-cycled, (except of course it is carefully choreographed, with the skill of a long time practitioner who is a master of her craft.)  And, as in any turbulence, nothing stays still, so what you see as one thing becomes something else, in a constant kaleidoscopic metamorphoses that is in synch with the flux that is universal, multiversal.

Klein says that she is inclined toward art that makes a strong statement, an inclination that is evident in her own work. She has also sought out women artists as mentors and models. Louise Nevelson was an early influence with whom she worked in the 1980s and who showed her what it meant to be an independent woman artist at a time when successful women artists were still a rarity. But while Klein has no doubt admired Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell, she also seems to come out of a history of colorists, symbolists and fantasists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Robert Delaunay, Odilon Redon, Henri Rousseau, and Edward Hicks, among others. Abstract and representational, sophisticated and naïf, it is a reimagined version of symbolism and surrealism.

A naturally gifted colorist who makes it all look easy—it is not—she has been a printmaker of note who established her own printmaking studio, working with eminent artists throughout the years, learning much from them, she said. She also has learned from printmaking, applying many of its techniques to her paintings, and the reverse. But are these paintings? They seem more a mix of genres, like much contemporary work, and are usually on paper, a support she prefers and joined in that preference by more and more artists of late, flush with an array of mediums in addition to paint such as watercolor, ink, pencil, pastels, and more. 

Pick any work of hers and be prepared to spend a long time with it--Midsummer Night’s Dream (2015), for instance. It is named for Shakespeare’s eternally enchanting comedy about fairies, mismatched lovers, trickeries, jealousy, love potions (drugs!), and much, much more before the eventual happy resolutions. In Klein’s work, its magic is conveyed through color. Her shimmering pastoral fairyland is evoked through tender greens, a sweet patch of pink, the color dabbed throughout for good measure.  Other luminous, light-hearted hues conjure fairy folk while the more earthy tones suggested less exalted characters. But within that magic kingdom, characteristically, there are also less benign, more rodent-like animals, some with haunting, hungry eyes. Veering from Shakespeare to more pernicious realities, it made me think of the brilliant opening sequence in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) where beneath the verdant blandishment of green lawns, as also in Klein’s work, there are life-and-death battles being waged.

Her diptych Disbelief and Carnage (2016), on the other hand, is more unambiguously dark, as are the colors--the dystopian blacks and blues, a splattering of crimson and rust like blood stains--and the images--a faceless person holding what might be a baby contrasted with a bemused, cherubic child, or fierce, ghoulish men with blackened (goggled?) eyes brandishing weapons, for instance. The title calls up the dispiriting images and headlines that are now our daily bread, greeting us with never-ending stories about wars, suicide bombings, refugees drowned at sea, ethnic cleansings, and other horrifying stories of atrocities and devastation perpetrated by humans on humans in which civilization as we once imagined it seems to have vanished, to be replaced by a Hobbesian world. This, too, is part of Klein’s encompassing vision, one that sees reality and the human condition as a jumble of contradictions and complexities in which hope and beauty, despair and horror co-exist, the former all the more precious in the face of the latter.