John Klein
After The Light

Name: John Klein
Start: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
End: 2023-08-27 00:00:00
Location: MACRO - Museum of contemporary art

MACRO - Museum of contemporary art

Rome, Lazio, Italy

The show

Jochen Klein (1967-1997) was an artist whose work, both as a painter and as a social and political observer, is characterized by themes concerning the private and public, internal and collective spheres of the late 20th century. Trained in the painting class at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, Klein here begins to question his relationship with this medium and its dominant role in artistic production in the early 1990s, moving towards a collaborative practice, to then return to the canvas in the last years of his life.

While attending the Academy Klein shares his discomfort with the self-referentiality of painting with fellow students Thomas Eggerer and Amelie von Wulffen, all three influenced by the work of Helmut Draxler, then curator of the Kunstverein in Munich. In fact, Klein had already begun to concentrate on subjects – interiors of luxurious buildings, bright colors and scenes of innocence – which distinguished him from his peers and from the legacy of the macho painter characteristic of painting up to that period. Klein begins to address the theoretical concerns of the age, expanding the scope of what art, artist or artists, in collaboration with others, can undertake both in terms of language and subject matter. This prompted Klein and Eggerer to turn their attention to issues "outside art", resulting in their first collaboration, a site-specific installation entitled Leave a Message (1994). The work consisted of a bulletin board placed on the outside wall of a public toilet in Munich's Englischer Garten, a well-known cruising spot for the gay community. This work marks the beginning of Klein's involvement in projects related to the collectivity and the symbolically stratified nature of public space, halfway between design and its future subversion.