Emil Michael Klein
VORHANG

When Emil Michael Klein studied at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW from 2002 to 2005, he also attended the theory weeks I offered. Using art and museum theory, we examined the classical European avant-garde movements of the early 20th century and their consequences for the concept of art and artwork in art after 1960. In post-war modernism, the concept of the artwork was challenged, as was the idea of the art museum. Artists were convinced that the new in art was reflected both in a constantly expanding concept of the work and in its spatial presentation. Based on Hans Belting’s writings on the history of the masterpiece, which had long been a key point of reference in Western art history, I read selected texts with the students, including works by philosophers such as Walter Benjamin and Boris Groys, as well as texts by artists such as Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Brian O'Doherty, and Goran Đorđević. One of the central painterly positions in our specific context of discussion today, and already during Emil Michael Klein’s studies, is that of the American painter Robert Ryman. The characteristics of analytical painting (the painterly exploration of color, image carriers, and paint application, as well as the thematization of authorship and the specific mediality of painting itself), which have been the subject of numerous painterly investigations by artists of different generations since the 1960s and were long associated primarily with the name of Ryman, are also striking features of Klein's painting. The formal reduction and the simplest possible internal organization of the artwork are constants in his work. In his study Forms of the Visible: An Anthropology of Figuration(Berlin, 2023), French anthropologist Philippe Descola pointed out that in modernism, the pictorial space “became the actual subject of the work and did without any reference to an external reality.” Using the example of Piet Mondrian's painting, he explains in his account of the development of Western art since the Renaissance how Mondrian “stripped the depicted objects of their surface articulations and the false appearance of linear perspective,” “so that only the mental process triggered by the representation of a piece of the world is still perceptible on the canvas.” With abstraction, the illusionistic, perspectival representation of three-dimensional space as a two-dimensional image was abandoned. However, as Descola explains, what was not relinquished was the aspiration “to depict the very experience of description itself, the mental as well as the sensory process through which the world is perceived and rendered.” Returning to Klein’s painting with this observation in mind and looking closely at what his paintings, and in particular his Curtains, reveal, three main features stand out: alongside the abstract pictorial space, there is the absence of the human figure and, above all, the thematization of the signature as a pictorial figure, which runs consistently through his work to date.

The signature “EMK” forms the starting point of the painting process in some of his monochrome paintings. The painting unfolds across the entire picture surface, starting from the three painted letters, and gives the pictorial space a specific orientation. On his textile works, mostly executed in velvet, this signature appears as an appliqué. Executed as screen prints, rubbing prints, silhouettes, or hand-painted forms on a piece of fabric, the signatures are less reminiscent of an authorization of the work by the artist than of a brand logo from product design, especially fashion. Emil Michael Klein’s textile works can be exhibited on the wall like paintings. However, he usually displays the Curtainsin the exhibition space either attached to long metal rods stretched between the floor and ceiling with decorative holders he has designed himself, or hanging freely in the room as space-defining objects. Showing the falling heavy fabric and the associated theme of gravity are important to him. While his paintings always appear as excerpts from an open, minimally structured, and unlimited energetic surface, the Curtains emphasize the vertical in the room and express a physical presence. He is hardly concerned with mimetic representation and illusionistic image effects. Klein works on the concrete appearance and sensory evidence of the works. His works can be experienced as an artistic reflection of the aesthetic.

Roman Kurzmeyer

Emil Michael Klein

Curtain, 2018
Velvet, cotton, aluminium, wood, rubber
247 x 306 cm / dimensions variable

Curtain, 2019
Velvet, cotton, aluminium, wood, rubber
271 x 173 cm / dimensions variable

Curtain, 2019
Flannel, cotton, aluminium, wood, rubber
320 x 260 cm / dimensions variable

Curtain, 2019
Velvet
285 x 210 cm / dimensions variable

Curtain, 2020
Velvet, foam, blankets, wood, acrylic paint, aluminium, polyurethane
270 x 144 cm / dimensions variable

Curtain, 2020
Velvet, linen, screen printing
255 x 167 cm / dimensions variable

Curtain, 2021
Velvet, linen, aluminium, wood, rubber, screen printing
400 x 350 cm / dimensions variable

Curtain, 2025
Velvet, cotton, aluminium, wood, rubber
230 x 327 cm / dimensions variable

Curtain, 2026
Velvet, linen
208 x 224 cm / dimensions variable

Emil Michael Klein (born in Munich) studied studied Fine Arts in the bachelor’s program at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW from 2002 to 2005, and completed a master’s degree in Visual Arts at the École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) in 2013. He has exhibited internationally with institutional solo shows such as Darkotic at the Kunsthalle Zürich and Emil Michael Klein at the Museum im Bellpark in Kriens (both 2017). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including Stop Painting, curated by Peter Fischli, at the Fondazione Prada in Venice (2021) and Undisturbed Solitude, curated by Chus Martínez, at the Kunsthaus Hamburg (2016). The artist has exhibited several times at Galerie Francesca Pia in Zurich and Galleria Federico Vavassori in Milan. Emil Michael Klein lives and works in Zurich.