Paintings

Paintings presents a current series of paintings. The format of the book will completely transform the images in terms of medium, format, and size. The large-scale works were created between 2013 and 2016 in oil on canvas. The printed book, with its limited dimensions, stands in stark contrast to these works and gathers 30 high-quality art prints of the paintings selected by the artist, as well as a selection of other visual approaches to the series. The latter were created in collaboration with designer Teo Schifferli. Emil Michael Klein's interest lies primarily in the exploration and mixing of the different processes of printing and painting within the specific format of the artist's book. The artery-like tissue of colored lines and monochromatic color fields in his paintings formally resembles products of printmaking. It is precisely these differences and similarities, the ambivalence in switching artistic mediums, that Emil Michael Klein seeks to further explore. Alongside the intriguing issue of transforming originals into reproductions, the question of how the image is viewed and disseminated is a central aspect of this artist's book. Based on his concepts of seriality and variation, as well as abstract painting, Emil Michael Klein provides the illustrations in this book with nothing more than a brief caption. The book does not include any accompanying text.