School of Creative Arts, UWE Bristol:
Artists’ Books by Randy Klein
8th December 2008 to 11th January 2009
My work has been diverse across a wide range of media. What has held the strands of my artistic practice together has been the narrative. Therefore it has been natural for me to work with the artist’s book. It has given me an opportunity to compress the diversity of media between two covers and stitch it into a binding. The book has been a laboratory for ideas, a repository for image and writing, a diary and travel journal.
Sculpture has been a central practice for me, and I have created outdoor public sculpture which is sited in many public locations, including a 25 ft. stainless steel sculpture in Brimmington Park, on the Old Kent Road in London, and a sculpture for Paterson Park in Bermondsey.
My books and prints are in many private and public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Getty, the Brooklyn Museum, Tate Gallery, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the New York Public Library. I have now held over 30 solo exhibitions.
Since moving to London in 1984, I have exhibited widely in the UK, France, and Italy, while continuing to exhibit in the US. Many of these solo exhibitions have been in public galleries, including Midland Arts Centre (mac) in Birmingham (1997, 1994), and the European Academy in London (2000, 1997) My most recent exhibition was a solo show of sculptures inspired by the Divine Comedy of Dante at the Istituzione Biblioteca Classense in Ravenna, from 12 Sept to 20 October 2008.
I am represented by GX Gallery London, where a show of recent paintings was on from 7-20 November 2008. ( www.randyklein.co.uk )
About my sculpture, John Russell Taylor has written:
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Some artists have to labour long and hard to translate
their ideas into sculptural form. The results are not always bad, but
they always retain a certain
heavy, mechanical quality. How much better to be like Randy Klein, who seems to think in sculptural terms as easily and directly as the bird sings.
John Russell Taylor The Times
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Randy Klein's ‘Florida - or you can't fight
progress' is an epic tale of creation and destruction. Icons of American
life are joined by images of freeways
and rockets, suntanned surfers and curling waves, Florida oranges, yachts and suburban houses. The text, beginning grandiloquently “In the beginning
there was the void...” is gloriously subverted by the images chosen to accompany it.
The variety of techniques employed and the shifting narrative make this a lively book full of mostly delightful surprises. However, even the light-hearted
depiction of the American dream has a darker side. Beneath the quirky humour lie images of slavery, race riots, and depredations of progress, hinted
at in the subtitle. The books structure allows us to follow a narrative and to uncover layers of meaning in a way that could not be done with any other
form of art.’
Meg Duff, librarian, Tate Gallery