Title: Tulips Date: 2000 Media: oil and wax on canvas Dimensions: 72 x 147 inches Price: contact the gallery for price Fassbender Gallery 312.666.4302

Fassbender | van Straaten Gallery is pleased to present new paintings by well-respected and influential Chicago artist Vera Klement. She is returning to the gallery for her fifth solo exhibition. Klement is a painter of large canvasses that carry a monumental vision. The images draw the viewer into the nuanced, painterly surfaces and gain cohesion and recognizability as they project across a large distance. Klement works with oil and wax pigments. Her surfaces are rich and varied: spontaneous, energetic gestures of thick paint and translucent veils and splatters oppose tightly controlled geometries. Abstraction and figuration reside side by side. The figurative elements are objects that are universally known, archetypal and timeless: the torso, tree, landscape, boat, bell, tub, fish, etc. These are built up in layers and seem to be hewn rather than painted into massive, almost sculptural presences. They fuse the mythic and the  poignantly personal. The images exist in isolation on fields of untouched white that become vast, silent spaces - spaces for contemplation. Drawing inspiration from notions of counterpoint and polyphony, Klement controls the coexistence within a single work of different ways of painting and seemingly unrelated images that evoke feelings of loss at the same time that they form a celebratory and ecstatic vision of the world. Concurrently, Fassbender | van Straaten’s South Gallery will feature Painting by Chicago artist, Brian Willey.