NEW YORK, NY.- Nara Roesler announced the representation of Maria Klabin (Rio de Janeiro, 1978). A painter at her core, Klabin's work aligns with the rich Brazilian contemporary painting scene, through an ambitious approach to large scale canvases, printmaking and drawing. Her repertoire is figurative and engages with scenes and occurrences -often stressing their landscape dimension- that permeate everyday life, being seen and experienced exhaustively.
The artist’s process lays in constantly producing and assembling drawings, photographs, and annotations, which she draws from her immediate entourage. The accumulation of thoughts and images entwine and come to make sense as a whole, unveiling intriguing relations that form the backbone of the artist's pictorial endeavor. In her own words, Klabin develops works ‘as if writing a story, or a diary, but a diary of things that don’t really happen. It’s a narrative that could only be told through painting, but that touches themes that seem closer to writers than to painters.’
Maria Klabin oscillates between extremes in terms of the scale of her works, producing both very small and monumental, large scale paintings, depending on the nature of her subject. Her small canvases often serve as support for rapid streams of thought - like writing on paper, perhaps harnessing an unconscious mind - and effectively capturing the rhythm of her surroundings, while her large pieces embody more contemplative, oneiric perceptions.
Most recently, Klabin has produced a series of almost mural-sized landscape paintings that depart from fragments of autobiographical elements, distilled from what she describes as an improbable and fluid patchwork of memory, that results in non-objectifiable, enticing yet daunting compositions.
Maria Klabin studied Visual Arts and Art History at Brandeis University, in Massachusetts, USA, where she was awarded the Susan May Green Award for painting. In 2002, she earned an MA from Central Saint Martins - University of the Arts London, in London, UK. Her works are also part of important institutional collections, such as Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil and Itau Cultural, São Paulo, SP, Brazil.
Nara Roesler looks forward to working with Maria Klabin to foster insight into, and further cognizance of, the artist's practice, striving to reach both national and international audiences. Her representation forms part of the gallery's ongoing and relentless efforts to cultivate and strengthen the presence of Brazilian artistic production throughout audiences, markets and institutions.
The first iteration of Maria Klabin and Nara Roesler's collaboration will take place on the occasion of the artist's participation in the group exhibition In Waiting: Works produced in Isolation currently on view at Nara Roesler in São Paulo, Brazil, and in Cross Cuts, opening in January 2021 at Nara Roesler in New York, USA, as part of the gallery's inauguration program of its new and expanded Chelsea space.
