Carla Klein
In the final days of preparation leading up the opening of her exhibition ‘Close Distance’ at KM21 Den Haag, the Dutch painter Carla Klein welcomes me to her Rotterdam studio. Overhead skylights diffuse light over large paintings in long horizontal formats, stacked carefully against the walls. These windows produce a constant, cool light. The effect is of time suspended, much as it is in Carla’s paintings of unpeopled architecture and deserted landscapes. However, there is also texture, life, animation: in her frank and open laughter, in the encrusted tubes of oil paint on her palette, in the strange dazzles and smears that invade her paintings.
Darkroom beginnings
After furnishing me with a fuzzy fleece ‘just for guests’, Carla and I sit at a large wooden table and discuss her journey as a painter. Her preoccupation has always been with ‘real things’ — how they are represented, shown and painted. As a student at KABK Den Haag, this quest initially led her to photography. ‘In the nineties, photography was such a different thing,’ she explains. ‘You would go to a one-hour service to get your photos developed!’ In (…)
