Vera Klement: After A Life

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Zolla/Lieberman Gallery proudly presents an exhibition celebrating the life and work of Vera Klement (1929 - 2023), one of Chicago's most distinguished figures in contemporary art. Vera Klement: After a Life spans decades of the artist's career featuring a curated selection of paintings and drawings that navigate her various artistic styles from abstract expressionism to figurative exploration.

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"Much has been written—beautifully so—about Vera's paintings and works on paper, and the melding of techniques that make them so powerful. She painted what was ordinary with great precision. In her renderings of trees, landscapes and figures we see the influence of the European masters Vera admired. But, having grown up in the radius of the postwar New York art scene, Vera was also an “action painter,” a term coined by her close friend, New Yorker art critic Harold Rosenberg, to describe the technique most often associated with Jackson Pollock's dripping paint on a canvas spread on the floor.

Vera preferred to paint alone, so I rarely saw her work. But one of my favorite memories is of Vera in well worn, open-toed sandals almost dancing around a drawing she had placed on the ground, making it new, and new yet again, with each exuberant fling of her paintbrush. The splattered floors, the layers upon layers of color enveloping her workbench, the dozens of mixing bowls, each inches-thick with dried paint—all spoke to the sheer physicality of her creativity." 

- excerpt from You Are Beyond: Remembering Vera Klement by Anne K. Ream

>Read the full article here