NEW YORK, NY.- Christie’s New York will present a special selling exhibition of paintings by New York-based artist Gloria Klein, on view in the galleries at Rockefeller Center from 17-30 June. The first major solo show in New York dedicated to Klein’s works from the 1970’s, Beautiful Structures recognizes the seminal role Klein played in organizing ground-breaking lesbian artists’ awareness initiatives in SoHo and the Lower East Side in the 1970’s. An artist central to the Pattern & Decoration movement, which has seen a renewal in interest over recent years, Klein’s work was featured in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art catalogue in 2019 and the Blanton Museum of Art’s Expanding Abstraction exhibition in the fall of 2020. Klein’s work was also prominently featured in A Lesbian Show—curated by Harmony Hammond in 1978 at 112 Greene Street Workshop—which is widely considered to be the first important lesbian art exhibition. As part of Christie’s’ celebration of LGBT Pride month, Beautiful Structures at Christie’s showcases the extraordinary talent of this newly rediscovered artist.
Sara Friedlander, Christie’s Deputy Chairman of 21st Century Art, remarked, “Like so many women artists whose work did not neatly align with the predominant artistic trends, Gloria Klein struggled to gain recognition in the era in which she was making art. Christie’s is so pleased to provide an opportunity for collectors to experience Gloria’s work and learn more about the decades-long career of this influential artist.”
“The 15 works included in Beautiful Structures demonstrate Klein’s Minimalist, Conceptual and systems-based practice,” said April Richon Jacobs, Independent Art Advisor and Curator. “Encountering Gloria’s hatch-mark paintings in person imparts a profound intimacy, where the slightly-raised surface of each individual mark drives home the intricate, meticulous, and almost instinctual process of their creation.”
Among her myriad of influences, Klein recalls her father’s career as a wallpaper hanger as having a formative influence on her work. She also took classes with the Conceptual artist Robert Barry at Hunter College in the early 1970’s. Barry encouraged her to think about the invisible systems through which the larger world around us is organized, Richon Jacobs writes in an essay for the exhibition. While at Hunter, Gloria also was introduced to the phenomenological possibilities of color and its relationships by the artist Robert Swain. Swain was a longtime member of the “Hunter Color School,” whose artists took a meticulous, scientific approach to color by investigating how it is visually perceived.
As a woman and lesbian, Klein often felt like an ‘outsider’, though her work was included in many of the early, seminal Pattern & Decoration shows in New York in the 1970s, including Pattern Painting at P.S.1 in November of 1977.
Klein’s legacy parallels that of other important women artists whose work has also been reappraised in recent years, including Yayoi Kusama, Ruth Asawa and Louise Bourgeois. This exhibition allows visitors to Christie’s to witness the depth and breadth of her work through a new lens.
