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F
or over twenty years Deborah Klein’s artwork has been governed by the exploration of feminine personæ and shifting identities across various social, cultural, and historical contexts. Her practice includes drawing, printmaking and painting, characterised by intensive research, immersion in period details, and a certain nostalgia. The recent touring survey exhibition ‘Out of the Past, 1995-2007’, curated by Diane Soumilas, drew on Klein’s intriguing catalogue of female archetypes. The exhibition borrowed its title from the 1947 Jacques Tourneur film, reflecting Klein’s abiding interest in cinema, particularly the glamorous anti-heroines as portrayed by actresses like Barbara Stanwyck, Jane Greer, and Rita Hayworth. Klein’s ‘Film Noir’ series (1995-96) skillfully integrates the classic hard-edged black-and-white filmic sensibility into punchy graphic linocuts. Klein’s roster of amoral femmes fatales inhabit a bleak nocturnal landscape of flickering street lights and treachery, with the odd splash of hand-coloured carnal red to denote their disappointment.
Klein’s protagonists are anonymous, unknowable, and sometimes latently threatening creatures, whose motivations are never elucidated. She often obscures the features of her subjects, superimposing tattoos, lace, and petit-point onto them like camouflage. Sometimes their faces are abbreviated altogether, as with the artist’s ‘Torso’ works (2002-03), where close-fitting evening gowns and lace wraps are worn by ostensibly headless models. Costume and ornamentation is both an armour and a means of concealment: artistically Klein relishes the technical difficulties presented by this penchant for the dramatic. She also pays tribute to the ‘genteel’ or ‘domestic’ arts—socially approved areas of women’s creativity and industry—with references to needlework, embroidery, quilting, crocheting, and dress-making. Klein’s Silk Cut Award winning piece, The Lair of the Lyrebird (1997), was an adventurous and multi-layered mergence of linocut, interfacing, and hand-stitching. More recently... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline