Vera Klute’s forthcoming solo exhibition Plunge, the first major survey of work by this multi-disciplinary artist, will give an overview of a diverse practice, ranging from video to painting, sculpture and drawing.
While portraiture plays a large part in Klute’s work, the artist is not limited to traditional oil painting, but applies media such as animation or ceramics to the genre.
The main focal pieces of this exhibition cannot be categorized easily. A large video projection is a slow meditation on our place in this world based on renaissance ideas of heaven, earth and the underworld. An elaborate sculpture made entirely from paper depicts a number of legs tumbling over each other. In a similar manner, conjoined limbs take a dynamic dive from the ceiling covered in milky, wet silicone. The artist also has a keen interest in mechanics and shows a wall full of waving paper arms and ephemeral clouds revolving on acrylic discs.
All the work has a playful, home-made quality. Whether it is realistic painting or geometric paper sculpture, each piece showcases technical skill as well as great attention to detail and inventiveness with materials.
While the work is formally and technically very different, there are underlying ideas throughout the exhibition. Themes are inspired by the everyday and utilize familiar objects and imagery. The artist looks at how we perceive the outside world and our place in it and sees the individual as displaced in its own habitat. Like an outside observer Klute is attempting to make sense of an often-absurd everyday life with its cycles, routines and habits, while looking at the human condition, to categorize and find the pattern within the chaos.
Klute’s work blurs the boundaries between the self and the other. Bodies merge and slice into each other and the movements of the group as a whole turn into waves.
The work talks about monotony, but also creates a meditative sense of the ordinary. It sees the familiar removed from its usual context, often with a slight sense of uneasiness.
Vera Klute was born in Germany in 1981 and has been based in Dublin since 2001. She has exhibited widely in Ireland and abroad and her work is part of both private and public collections. Most notably her work has been included in the Portrait Collection of the National Gallery of Ireland and the National Self- portrait Collection. In 2015 Klute won the Hennessy Portrait Prize at the National Gallery and was awarded the Hennessy Craig Scholarship at the RHA 185th Annual Exhibition, 2015. She has received several Arts Council Bursary Awards, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013, the K+M Evans Award, RHA 183rd Annual, 2013 and the Emerging Visual Artist Award, Wexford Arts Center, 2009. Recent solo exhibitions include the Molesworth Gallery, 2016, the LAB, 2006, 2014, the RHA Ashford Gallery, 2014, QSS Gallery, Belfast, 2014, the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, 2011 and Wexford Arts Center 2009. Work for this exhibition made with the kind support of DIT, Dublin Institute of Technology.