David Klamen was born on 1961 and is an American artist and academic.
28 Facts About David Klamen
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David Klamen is known for visually diverse paintings that meld technical mastery with postmodern explorations of the processes by which humans understand and interpret experience.
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David Klamen's work sits in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
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David Klamen has been based in Chicago for most of his career, which includes being an educator for over thirty years, primarily at Indiana University Northwest, where he was appointed Founding Dean, School of the Arts in 2018.
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Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel wrote that a Klamen exhibition could appear to be the work of as many as six distinct artists, yet display sharp focus and virtuoso painting across a constellation of styles, subjects and strategies.
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David Klamen called Klamen "a master of the double take," using ambiguity to create epistemological doubt and curiosity in viewers.
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David Klamen was born in 1961 in Dixon, Illinois, in the United States.
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David Klamen initially studied medical illustration at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, but switched to fine arts and abstract painting.
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David Klamen returned to representational work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, melding his regard for Minimalism, realist painting skills, and interests in hermeneutics and literature to develop a signature style: dark, highly varnished oil paintings of animals, landscapes and interiors, rendered with meticulous craftsmanship, such as Kings Knight or Untitled.
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David Klamen attracted art-world attention while still in school; he sold work, appeared in prestigious shows at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and Art Institute of Chicago, and secured representation with the Marianne Deson Gallery in Chicago, where he later sold out his first two solo exhibitions.
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David Klamen has shown at Richard Gray Gallery since 1991 and at Haines Gallery and Mark Moore Gallery.
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David Klamen has received reviews in numerous journals and US and international newspapers.
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David Klamen is married to Dianne Lauble, Principal of Blue Fly Toy and a former Director of Design at Hasbro Toy Group.
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In 1985, David Klamen began creating meticulous oil renderings of solitary, frozen animals and atmospheric, noir-ish landscapes based on memory, which he explored for their metaphorical qualities.
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David Klamen nearly obliterated these images with a layer of up to twenty coats of varnish, distancing them under an impenetrable, dark sepia-toned gloss, like insects in amber.
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David Klamen introduced a related series in 1996: his "Daimoku" paintings, which overlapped illusionistic images of the Lake Michigan landscape with small, repetitive white dots, each an index or record of his touch and a symbol of one, repeated Buddhist meditative chant.
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David Klamen sought to make this work "teeter on the edge" of various pictorial languages, in this case, Peirce's semiotic modes of representation, while investigating painting as a process of enlightenment or self-knowledge, akin to meditation.
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In 2002, David Klamen extended his vocabulary, creating dark landscape drawings, made by erasing into a sheet completely covered in graphite.
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In 1996, David Klamen began to exhibit salon-style, multi-canvas installations of two-dozen or more eclectic paintings that explored taxonomy as a method, while providing a new mode of expression through the intertextuality of the canvasses.
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David Klamen found that in concert they revealed surprises and formed wholes that David Pagel described as "multi-faceted, intimate panorama," in which reverie, intuition and dreaminess took precedence over rationality.
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The tiny paintings read as believable landscapes and sunsets, evoking David Klamen's deeply internalized memories of Midwestern lakes, skies, and trees, while revealing how repetition, habit and the codes and conventions of landscape painting and ideas of nature can shape a viewer's experience.
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David Klamen created both individual paintings and multi-canvas installations in this series.
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David Klamen has worked in academia for more than thirty years, teaching painting, drawing, fundamental studio and art theory, and serving in various administrative capacities.
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David Klamen began as an adjunct professor at Valparaiso University in 1985, before accepting a tenure-track assistant professor position that fall at Indiana University Northwest.
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David Klamen served as Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and Chair, Department of Fine Arts.
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In 2018, David Klamen returned to Indiana University Northwest and was appointed Founding Dean, School of the Arts.
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David Klamen has frequently lectured on topics including art fairs, beauty, art collecting, the history of art galleries in Chicago, and his own work, among others, at venues including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Humanities Festival, Art Chicago, MCA Chicago, and numerous universities.
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David Klamen's works are in numerous permanent public collections, including those of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Chazen Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Krannert Art Museum, Illinois State Museum, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea, Crocker Art Museum, McNay Art Museum, and City of Chicago, among others.