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 Title: Installation View from the 1998 San Francisico International Art Exposition Date: 1998 Media: oil on canvas Dimensions: Price: contact the gallery for price Fassbender Gallery 312.666.4302 |
 
Vera Klement's 1997 exhibition at Fassbender Gallery featuring large- scale oil paintings. The noted art critic Donald Kuspit writes about Klement's paintings, Subject matter and style converge with a rare poignancy and resonance in Vera Klements poem-paintings. Her images appear abruptly in the empty space of the canvas - a vast abysmal absence - like briskly falling stars. Each is a transient visionary presence in the nothingness, ambiguously emblematic of hope.A catalogue was published in conjunction with this exhibition, which included an essay by Donald Kuspit and 12 color reproductions. Klement's exhibition, Portraits of Poets, included oil paintings that were made during a period of intense involvement with the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Paul Celan and Nellie Sachs which Klement had begun to translate into English from the original Russian and German languages. The poets were chosen not only because they are among the greatest of our century, but also because an effort was made to silence each one of them by violent and repressive societies. The portraits were painted as a result of her engagement with the poetry. Image, gesture , vision, insight and knowing within the poetry itself gave her an understanding of the poet's appearance. No research or source material was used to obtain a likeness. As Vera Klement states, "My interest lies not in a frontal facial depiction as is common in photos of that period, but rather the head itself as object, as weight and mass, and how that weight situates itself in space, and creates space." 1999 PRESS RELEASE |
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