Anita Klein: Out of the Ordinary: Forty Years of Printmaking - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1908970588 ISBN 13: 9781908970589

Publisher: Art/Books, 2022

Synopsis

Anita Klein is an artist of the everyday and the personal. For more than forty years, she has produced thousands of paintings, prints, and drawings depicting her immediate family – husband, daughters, grandchildren, and herself – going about the very ordinary activities of daily life: watching television, cooking, reading, driving to school, soaking in the bath, getting dressed, cleaning the house, choosing a pet, going on holiday, or just cuddling up and sharing tender moments with loved ones. She captures these seemingly unremarkable domestic scenes with such humour, sensitivity, and beauty to create an intimate visual journal with which everyone can identify. Influenced by Italian Renaissance fresco painting, her direct style pares down forms into strong and simple shapes, transforming the images into contemporary secular icons that reveal a joyful and unselfconscious delight in the common ‘dailiness of life’. Witty, charismatic, warm, and poignant, Klein’s pictures depict a specific family, but her diaristic archive of life’s small and familiar moments tells a universal story.

This book is a selection of five hundred and fifty of Klein’s best-loved prints. It presents a charming chronological record of the family’s day-to-day life through the decades, seen from the artist-mother’s perspective, as they grow and change in their respective roles within the household. We can also follow her development as a printmaker, from the simple monochrome drypoints in the 1980s, a consequence of the practical and financial demands of being a young stay-at-home mum, through to the more colourful and elaborate prints of recent years.

A personal appreciation of Anita Klein’s work by acclaimed poet Hollie McNish opens the volume, while texts by Rebecca and Vincent Eames, who have collaborated with the artist for more than two decades, and critic Mel Gooding provide an introduction to her practice. Klein herself gives recollection and further detail with short commentaries on the images and the occasions that they depict, and poems contributed by Dame Carol Ann Duffy, Hollie McNish, and Wendy Cope complete this delightful publication.

About this title

About the Author

Australian-born artist Anita Klein (b.1960) studied at Chelsea and Slade Schools of Art in London in the early 1980s, studying under Paula Rego among others. She has exhibited internationally and public collectors of her work include the British Museum and the Arts Council. She has work in many private and public collections in Europe, the USA and Australia, including the Arts Council of Great Britain, the British Museum and the British Library. She has had many solo exhibitions in the London as well as worldwide, and three monographs of her paintings have been published. She was President of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers from 2003 to 2006, and she was awarded Printmaker of the Year at the 2020 Printfest International Festival of Printmaking in the UK. She lives and works between London and Italy.

From the Back Cover

Anita Klein is an artist of the everyday and the personal. For more than forty years, she has produced thousands of paintings, prints and drawings depicting her immediate family – husband, daughters, grandchildren, and herself – going about the very ordinary activities of daily life: watching television, cooking, reading, driving to school, soaking in the bath, getting dressed, cleaning the house, choosing a pet, going on holiday, or just cuddling up and sharing tender moments with loved ones. She captures these seemingly unremarkable domestic scenes with such humour, sensitivity and beauty to create an intimate visual journal with which everyone can identify. Influenced by Italian Renaissance fresco painting, her direct style pares down forms into strong and simple shapes, transforming the images into contemporary icons that reveal a joyful and unselfconscious delight in the common 'dailiness of life'. Witty, charismatic, warm, and poignant, she has become one of Britain's most popular artists and printmakers. As the Guardian wrote, ‘no British artist has more thoroughly explored the female experience of family in the past 30 years than Anita Klein’.

This book is a selection of around five hundred of the artist’s best-loved prints going back to her students days. It presents a charming chronological record of the family’s day-to-day life through the decades, seen from the artist-mother’s perspective, as they grow and change in their respective roles within the household. One can also follow Klein’s development as a printmaker through that time, from the simple monochrome drypoints in the 1980s, a consequence of the practical and financial demands of being a young parent, through to the more colourful and elaborate prints of more recent years. Post-pandemic and post-lockdown, this delightful diaristic archive of life’s small and familiar moments takes on added significance for it is a timely reminder of what daily existence is really about.

Edition details

• Publisher: Art/Books
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908970588
• ISBN 13: 9781908970589
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384