|
Home
Artist Statement
Background
Galleries
Reviews
Current Exhibits
Contact
|
Journey
into imagination: DREAMSCAPES
By: Eileen Watkins
February 28, 1992
Published by The Star-Ledger
In
style, the drawings, and prints of Charles S. Klabunde could be described as a
cross between the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer and illustrations for Grimm's Fairy
Tales.
He
creates symbolic vignettes using Medieval or Renaissance figures and settings,
to which the viewer may apply his own interpretations. The scenes could pertain
to folk fables or to universal human truths. Klabunde exhibits nearly 50 of his
works through March 21 in the Foosaner Gallery of the Paper Mill Playhouse,
Millburn.
Educated
in the Midwest, the artist now divides his time between a studio in Manhattan
and his gallery, Beyond the Looking Glass, in Frenchtown. He has shown his work
throughout the U.S. and Europe, in such locales as the Metropolitan Museum in
New York, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Borgia Palace in
Rome, Italy.
His
graphics have been purchased by heads of state, and he worked with the late
playwright Samuel Beckett to produce seven original engravings for Beckett's
script "The Lost Ones." He prints in one of the most difficult
mediums, using four-color, hand-engraved copper plates, to produce contours and
colors with an antique appearance.
"I
choose to distance my work from the present by emulating the distant past,"
Klabunde explains. "This separation of time creates the psychic space which
is necessary to construct images beyond our immediate perceptions, where the act
of magic begins."
A
few works adapt Biblical themes, with novel twists. A black, female angel reads
a proclamation to the Virgin Mary, who rides a donkey, on the "Flight into
Egypt." A woman seems to fly from a pond, carrying a baby and a basket, to
represent "Moses in the Bullrush." Klabunde also creates a host of
monsters, resembling those of Hieronymus Bosch but more whimsical, for his
black-and-white triptych "The Temptation of St. Anthony."
Other
compositions deal with mythological figures. A nude with feathery wings takes to
the sky among geese and angels in "Birth of Venus." A mysterious,
masked man with drooping wings sits brooding in the color print "Daedalus."
"Winged Equus" and two female angels stand poised on a balcony, about
to take off into the open sky...
|
|
