Anita Klein is an acclaimed painter and printmaker and is well-known for her witty, charismatic, warm, and poignant artwork. Anita Klein: Modern Icons presented paintings and original prints that explore key aspects of Klein’s work, including motherhood and family as valid subject matter for art and the central importance of drawing, design, and harmony in her compositions.
Anita Klein: Modern Icons
Inspired by the fresco paintings of the Italian Renaissance, Klein uses bold colours and the careful arrangement of her figures to achieve a harmonious picture. ‘I have been inspired throughout my career by early Italian Renaissance fresco painting. Those are the pictures that I find most beautiful. They hit me in a way that I cannot explain. I feel moved to tears, and ideally, I would like my work to be beautiful like that.’
Klein's work includes intimate and often comic moments with her partner or day-to-day life with her daughters, charting the various stages from babies and young children to teenagers and young adults to becoming parents themselves. Her work has always been about precious, tiny moments that are difficult to pinpoint when you’re in the middle of them, but, Klein says, they 'are the things that I really appreciate because they go so quickly’.
This exhibition included paintings, drawings, and prints, which offer an insight into the breadth of her work and her passion for the work of the early Italian Renaissance painters.
About Anita Klein
As a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in the early 1980s, Klein was instinctively drawn to the immediacy and poignancy of figurative art. Encouraged by Paula Rego, a visiting lecturer, to seek a way forward in the visual diaries that she had been keeping, Klein focused her artistic gaze on her life and young family. Rego also inspired Klein to experiment with printmaking. It was through these early woodcuts and drypoint etchings that Klein began to develop her distinctive style, which is widely loved and admired by so many.
Primarily using her friends and family as inspiration, Klein creates images that reflect her commitment to the idea that everyday experiences are memorable, valuable, and universal. She says of her career, ‘I have been making pictures of my everyday life, like a visual diary, for the past 40 years’.
Although the people in her pictures are based on herself or those close to her, she is not interested in creating individual portraits. Instead, she wants to capture how the moment feels and for this to resonate with the viewer and their own lives. The experience of daily life within a family or domestic environment is a rich source of inspiration for those artists who have chosen to engage with it. Still, it has also often been overlooked and undervalued. Through the work of Klein, and other artists and writers, there is a gradual shift towards greater recognition and status.
This direct connection with the viewer, the placing of individuals at the heart of the narrative and the power and beauty of a carefully balanced and harmonious composition are qualities that Klein is inspired by in the work of early Italian Renaissance painters. In 1984, while still a student at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, Klein was awarded the Joseph Webb Memorial Prize by the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers to spend the summer drawing from the Italian masters. She lived in Arezzo, Tuscany and spent a month exploring the frescos of Masaccio (1401-1428), Giotto (1267-1337) and Piero della Francesca (1415-1492). The classical ideas of beauty and harmony she saw in the careful arrangement of the figure within these Italian paintings continue to inspire Klein. Today she has a small flat in Anghiari where she regularly focuses on her paintings, several of which were included in this exhibition.
