NEW CANAAN, CONN.- Heather Gaudio Fine Art is presenting “Martin Kline: Allover Paintings,” his third solo exhibition at the gallery. The show opened on January 23rd and runs through March 6th, 2021.
Throughout the course of his career, Kline has examined systems of historicism and presentation with a focused and disciplined approach creating bodies of works in series. Each of these has had their distinctive visual language. For this exhibition, Kline presents his newest group of paintings entitled Allover, inspired by the drip technique he utilized in Dream of Pollock (for Kirk Varnedoe) back in 2007.
The multi-colored Allover series consists of, for the most part, strictly monochromatic abstractions. Created in a looser, automatist fashion, these paintings have a more fluid sensibility, with random thread-like rivulets of pigment networked in and out of broader, purposeful bands of color. The paintings are not merely monochromatic optical fields of encaustic webs or meshes, there is a distinction between line, bands of color and ground.
Unlike previous series, these paintings lack compositional focal points, nor do they possess narrative characteristics seen in his Hammocks assemblages. The viewer’s eye is free to wander all over and engage with the painted surface indiscriminately.
Kline is utilizing Pollock’s spontaneous technique but also shares his approach to painting horizontally largely because of the constraints of the encaustic medium. He has worked on his surfaces laid horizontally during his entire artistic career, the signature additive approach to painting necessitating the pull of gravity to fasten the pigments in situ while drying. For the most part, Kline’s hand has had a direct touch through the use of a paintbrush on the paper, panel or canvas. In the Allover paintings, he is still working horizontally but he has severed the traditional anatomical connection, distancing himself from the surface even more by placing the panels on the floor. This increased space relinquishes control for the drips and pours to act more randomly and allow for elements of surprise to occur. Most of the panels in this series lack confining frames and the sides are free of splashed pigments that reveal the process. The resulting suggestion is that the drips and thicker gestures of color travel beyond the picture plane. It is as if the viewer is getting a snapshot, a window into elements that exist outside the painting’s boundaries.
Kline has enjoyed a prolific artistic career, creating a continuum of output that draws from a wealth of sources including his own works. His paintings, drawings and sculptures are represented in many notable private and public collections worldwide, including the Albertina, Vienna, Austria; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of Art, New York and the Yale University Art Galleries, New Haven, CT.
