Rae Klein

What exactly happens during an out-of-body experience? Do our souls transcend, while our bodies linger in this world? The group exhibition ‘Disembodied’ attempts to explore this subject, presenting a diverse range of sophisticated works exuding ecstasy and sensuality. One risks getting lost in this parallel universe, but is guided through darkness and the unknown by the wise visions of these artists.

Rae Klein is tough. She has built a body of work that has received considerable praise. She was born in Michigan and is still there, working with a rhythm is respectable and representative of her success in recent years. Today, her role in this relationship is simple: she keeps producing.  However, there is nothing desultory about this method. What Klein does is focus on the essential element of her life. Klein has always drawn but hasn’t always worked in oils. Before attaining her BFA, she planned to become a nurse. Before covering gallery walls, she shipped paintings out of her garage. Now, she has a studio. Oh, and she paints. 

Rae Klein’s new exhibition provides Jungian commentary on the ever-evolving battle royale between man and nature from a feminine perspective. With this body of work, Klein distills her surrealist vocabulary down to a few familiar objects largely stripped of context and presented with a haunting (and often threatening) serenity. POWERPLAY is the Michigan-based artist’s third exhibition at Nicodim Gallery.

Klein’s paintings are imbued with a striking dichotomy; an off-kilter balance of the surreal and the ordinary, a departure from common ideas of stability and permanence, and an emphasis on the malleability of space.

Twenty-seven-year-old painter Rae Klein doesn’t have the typical art world signifiers: she never went to graduate school, or moved to New York (or any other big city for that matter). She does have one thing the art world covets these days: more than 99,000 followers on Instagram.

These are profoundly beautiful paintings. They effortlessly expand into mythic narratives, and are moving retablos of the human condition. Nostalgic and novel, they capture the deep emotional longings conveyed through depictions of objects that are resonant with hopes and dreams, loss and sorrow. 

If these paintings ask, “What might the visual expression of the object-oriented desire of the wealthy be now, in 2022,” they also ask: “What does all that feel like?” The answer might be something like “eerie, lonely, discomforting, and kind of… beautiful?”

Rae Klein’s haunting, dreamlike paintings feature familiar objects — a horse, a candelabra, a pair of eyes — but the juxtapositions offer little in the way of explanation. Rather, her spare, surreal compositions invite the viewer to construct their own narratives, like a Rorschach or rebus.