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Charles
Klabunde
April 1983
Published by Arts Magazine
Recent
denizens of the Franz Bader Gallery include floating clowns, dancing pigs, and a
web-footed fishlike monster with a well-trimmed moustache.
These creatures, at once charming and grotesque, are the creations of
Charles Klabunde. Recalling the
work of Bosch, Brueghel, Durer, and H.G. Wells, Klabunde’s black-and-white or
color etchings feature dense, highly complex, and fascinating imagery. What seem at first to be simple fantasy pictures are, in
fact, much more.
Charles S. Klabunde, “La Grande Execution de
Robespierre,”
1975 Etching,
23 ¾ x 17 ½”
For
example, The Wedding depicts a couple (labeled Adam and Eve) displayed in
traditional niches. However, a
closer inspection reveals Eve as a blonde bombshell wearing only a pair of
elaborate boots and flirting with a fugitive from a medieval bestiary.
Meanwhile Adam, clad in striped trousers, embroidered shirt, and
stovepipe hat, holds a mask to his face. Additional
characters include the inevitable serpent and a pair of pigs from outer space
dressed in blue and white pajamas. Similarly,
in Automaton, a clockwork man runs a highly eccentric shop filled with
wonderfully detailed antique furniture, marionettes, and pocket watches, a shop
in which distorted human faces seem to emerge, mysteriously, from every
available surface
Typically,
the artist’s etchings are full of “Gothick” elements (Hellmouths,
gargoyles, and elaborate tracery) and fantastic details (acrobats dangling from
ropes presumably suspended on skyhooks, and cablecars with dragons on their
roofs.) These technically
astounding scenes require several viewings to appreciate fully.
However, Klabunde’s best prints are his least fussy ones, works such as
Icarus and The Puppeteer which feature unexpected arrangements of
a limited number of figures. (Franz
Bader, January
5-22 (1983)
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