John Kleckner

Drawing, Fine Art — By Unknown Artist on May 17, 2009 at 2:47 pm

John Kleckner was born 1978 in the United States; lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Shoplifting images from art history, John Kleckner’s drawings subscribe to a complex relationship between authorship, contemporary art, and its lineage. Rejecting post-modern notions of appropriation as allegory, Kleckner engages in the old masters’ tradition of studying his predecessors – not as a means of perfecting technique – but to satiate his desire to infiltrate and possess the immaculate. Attracted to the timeless subject matter of portraiture, mythology, and botanical motifs, Kleckner recomposes archival prints and paintings as a way to make them his own.
Combining the hard-edge of illustration with the delicate washes of watercolour, Kleckner’s work attains a literary mannerism reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites. Kleckner’s beauty, however, is an uncomfortable entity. Gravitating between abstraction and figuration, his subjects are often disembodied or marred, their grotesque depictions diffusing into bursts of luscious mark-making.

 

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