Amy Kligman's Press packet
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Transcript of Amy Kligman's Press packet
60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC @ PROJECT SPACE KANSAS CITY, MO 4/16/10 4:35PM
AMY KLIGMAN
The paintings of Amy Kligman are deceptively pretty and sweet. Gentle, lithe girls are often their subject, as are girlish delights like kittens, balloons, bunnies and rainbows. But though Kligman’s pictures are often covered in flowers and other flora, everything is not here coming up roses. Look beyond the pastel colors and soft furry creatures—there lurks a subtle world of anxiety and shame and shyness. It’s in the blooms that cover the face and
torso of the cutie in “Girl Disappearing,” marks that are as much sores as flowers. Note her sad, red-rimmed eyes. Notice too that she has no nose, no mouth, and as such cannot fully communicate, even if she had the will to do so. A similar muteness affects the kind waif in “Please, Thank You, and You’re Welcome,” but here the blossoms, except for one that muffles her mouth, fill the background, making a wall of flowers and her a wallflower, the kind of girl who can’t manage to say much other than the words of her own title. What’s wrong with these sweet young things? It could be anything—the weight of the world is often placed on girls’ shoulders, as an entire commercial and spectacular economy has developed that revolves around girls as objects of desire and desiring objects. How to survive in the face of such pressures often means “going underground,” as sociologists have termed it, burying oneself in the face of puberty until it’s safe to come back up above ground. If it ever really is. —Lori Waxman
1/4/10 2:38 PMThe Cleveland Free Times :: Arts :: Arts Lead :: Winter Gardens
Page 1 of 3http://www.freetimes.com/stories/15/22/winter-gardens
"Lagoon" By Misha Kligman, gesso and
graphite on paper.
Free Times - Ohio's Premier News, Arts, &Entertainment Weekly
Arts
Volume 15, Issue 22
Published October 3rd, 2007
Arts Lead
Winter Gardens
Amy And Misha Kligman At Wooltex Gallery
By Douglas Max Utter
Every surface chips, cracks or peels. Bark is scattered on the
ground. The red decay of autumn bleeds slowly through the
dusty greens of late summer. We ourselves are painted in a
wash of molecules dissolving on a loosely woven fabric of
DNA, while the ghosts of old selves chatter in the background
of our brief, ever-changing lives.
Amy and Misha Kligman's current show at Wooltex Gallery is
called Pentimenti, which is an art historical term referring to
the way that earlier drafts of paintings, figures and
compositional elements that the artist painted over
sometimes become visible again. Upper layers can develop a strange transparency due to age
and other factors, and the result is a slightly uncanny vision of process and roads not taken. The
two Kligmans have very different takes on this metaphor, but both deal with the fickleness of
reality and the transience of surfaces.
Among the pleasures of Pentimenti is the artistic growth both painters demonstrate. Amy
Kligman, who formerly painted under the name of Amathin, has had a day job as an illustrator for
several greeting card companies over the years, both in Cleveland and in Kansas City where the
couple now lives. She's long used that experience to good effect, creating a layered, wallpaper-
like world where shreds and snippets of popular children's design culture - duckies, bunnies, wide-
eyed kids with big blond heads - survive only in a much-damaged state. Maybe it's childhood
itself that is half-obscured in this way by the corrosive rains of time and experience, or it could
be that Amathin's subject is rather the residue of lies told about children and how it distorts our
vision of ourselves. A sense of lost innocence, regret, and a hint that, despite everything, there
are still secret gardens nourishing the spirit are the hallmarks of her earlier work.
1/4/10 2:38 PMThe Cleveland Free Times :: Arts :: Arts Lead :: Winter Gardens
Page 2 of 3http://www.freetimes.com/stories/15/22/winter-gardens
"A Secret" By Amy Kligman, 2007.
are still secret gardens nourishing the spirit are the hallmarks of her earlier work.
These remain among her subjects, but Amy Kligman's
paintings at Wooltex are emotionally darker in tone and more
certain in their vision. Many of them explore interpersonal
moods and states, the mysteries of unspoken communication,
using elaborately unfurling speech balloons full of patterns or
flowers and colors - breath and unspoken inside words that
float between, say, two children.
"A Secret" (2007), for instance, shows a boy and a girl in
vaguely Victorian garb. He wears blue shorts and lace-up
leather boots, she is dressed in a plain yellow smock with
white trim. Behind them a small wood stands on five pale
tree trunks like a plump five-legged animal while in the gray
and white tangle of detail up in the belly of the branches, a
very big yellow bird's head sings a long teardrop
embroidered with blue leaves. The girl grasps the boy by his
arm and whispers a short, pale message, flowing in a shallow
double curve from her mouth to his ear. It may be poison
that she pours in his ear, or it just might be a word that will
change his life. The ambiguity is even more pronounced in
"Little Scream," which shows a group of small boys in rabbit costumes loitering near a slightly
older girl in a stiff tulle skirt and tiny black maryjanes. From her mouth issues a decorative yellow
plume of flowers, as if collaged on the air. The boys are perhaps slightly demonic with their
peculiar glasses and whiskers; the girl may show some signs of anxiety. But it's mainly the title
that casts doubt on this idyllic scene. All signs of inner chaos are so well-hidden in this enchanted
land that even a scream appears as a swath of wallpaper.
Misha Kligman graduated from Cleveland State University in 2001 and is currently pursuing a
graduate degree in the arts at the University of Kansas. He has been known over the past several
years for smaller scale, highly detailed realist self-portraits, among other subjects. Some of these
have actually been painted on top of photographs, but the current examples are all paint. The
exceptional quality of these works derives less from their detail and accuracy than from the
intensity they project. The selfhood that Kligman depicts is one that deliberately evades head-on
exposure, and the power of the portraits is based on a tension rising between the frankness of
the artist's self-scrutiny and what at first seems like a willful desire to hide from the viewer. One
painting shows him in profile, while in another, his eyes are closed, seated next to a man in
shadow. Here Kligman's face is upturned and his eyes are shut against strong sunlight, while his
companion, who gazes at him, is wrapped in shadow; on close examination we realize this second
1/4/10 2:38 PMThe Cleveland Free Times :: Arts :: Arts Lead :: Winter Gardens
Page 3 of 3http://www.freetimes.com/stories/15/22/winter-gardens
companion, who gazes at him, is wrapped in shadow; on close examination we realize this second
man is also Kligman. In a third work the artist looks straight at the viewer, but his eyes seem
unfocused or very tired. He is hunkered sideways in a small barrel-backed chair, wearing a red
and white plaid cowboy shirt. The room, like his eyes, is faded and empty, with a scuffed and
scumbled floor and a line on the right where two bare walls form an angle. In spirit it's a little like
one of Giacometti's famous self-portrait drawings, where the true subject is the space that the
figure occupies and the strangeness of one's own physical insertion into the world, into sensation
and thought and experience. That in the end is the situation that all of Kligman's paintings
attempt to reenact as he seeks not to hide, but to surprise himself from an accidental
perspective, revealing unsuspected intersections of mind and feeling, place and soul.
In keeping with this search, Kligman's "Lagoon" is a surrealist landscape, which like many
landscape paintings is also a metaphoric vision of the interior of the body as it spreads darkly
before the introspective self. A glass-like curlicue-shaped hybrid of dust devil and alchemical
filtration device churns toward us across uneven, desolate sands, casting its twisted shadow near
a circular depression, like a mark on the surface of the moon. A low line of barren mountains is
smudged across the horizon. Slanting in on the right side of this gesso-and-graphite-on-paper
work, a drive-in movie screen or a billboard displays a nude man and woman. Their magnified
and elongated bodies stretch over and under each other like earth and sky. Like everything here
by both Kligmans, the vision is of a present moment stretched so tightly over deception or doubt
that reality begins to wear away.
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