Untitled

Carla Klein
Untitled, 2010
Oil on canvas
160 x 260 cm

About the work

Carla Klein (1970, Zwolle, The Netherlands) is an artist who uses her own photography as a source material for her paintings. Starting with industrial sites she moved towards painting desert landscapes, which she has photographed during her travels. These landscapes are so monotonous that one might mistake the paintings as abstract.

This painting is based on photographs she made during a road trip through the southern state of Texas (US), adjacent to Mexico. Back in her studio in Rotterdam, she assembled the photographs into one big image. Each composition she makes pushes the original image towards abstraction while maintaining a close relationship to the photograph itself. Her paintings show this bond with the original image by the cracks, light spots and other mechanical imperfections from the original photograph that are copied onto the canvas.

Her paintings never depict people, the only sign of human presence being that of fractions of traffic lights, the road ahead or parts of the dashboard. She depicts the space “in between” or “no man’s land”. Like a photograph they capture just a moment in reality.
By using these large formats canvases she almost invites the viewer to step into the landscape she depicted and become part of the scenery.