Karl Klingbiel’s Castle (Chase Young Gallery, Boston, June 12 – July 19, 2025)
Since they are abstractions, any attempt to describe Karl Klingbiel’s works using objective language will fall short—and some have. Words like skein, loop, line, thread, etc. are interchangeable and fail to indicate a concrete piece. Slightly more helpful would be to master the names of the colors in the artist’s palette and then use them with extreme precision: a seven-inch-long horizontal loop against the pale lilac background. That would make a discussion of a 60” x 40” piece painfully unreadable and long. Equally at odds with the light beauty of Klingbiel’s art is overly cerebral, academic analysis. Abstract art should be discussed in terms of emotional impact on the viewer, in other words, rather than try to parse the painting, we should parse our emotional reaction to it: not what we feel—since that’s different for everyone—but how we feel it.
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We are lucky to have a whole show of his work on display, because Klingbiel’s paintings, for all their uniqueness, do not exist in a vacuum. The works in the current show are in constant dialogue, and they are connected by the strands of the common DNA. Those strands are the colors that lead, but never dominate, the polyphony in each image. Though perfectly balanced, with nothing to add or subtract, there is always one element in the composition that leads the others. Those leitmotifs spring from piece to piece across the white wall space between them, weaving an invisible web of familial connections. We realize, upon taking in the entire show, that we are in the presence of a family, both immediate and extended, interconnected by the continued strands.
These connections are subtle but unmistakable. In the show’s masterpiece, The Boatyard at Sindbad’s, the underlying grid of midnight blue can be traced over to the seemingly very different Difficult Hour, with a single almond-shaped splotch of the same color peeking out from under the palette of white and orange and pale teal. That splotch is a wink at The Boatyard, a signal to us that we are looking at a larger single organism. The same Boatyard is connected via a different strand—an uneven rectangular splash of light cobalt blue—to a closer relation, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The single ribbon of neon pink in the left bottom corner of Lattice continues across the white walls to The Boatyard and then to Counting House, a smaller composition in bright gold ochre and violet but with the same neon pink hugging the upper left edge.
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If one doesn’t have the advantage of the entire show, Palimpsest offers a dilution of Klingbiel’s mastery in its purest form. The idea of palimpsest is an ancient one; its original purpose was to reuse expensive parchments by scraping off the old texts and overwriting them with new ones. The original lettering would be practically invisible to the naked eye, but once raised by the special modern technology, it would form, together with the later overtext, two competing cultural currents—Christian and antique, for example, separated by a thousand years, like two opposing flows of traffic, thus creating an image that simultaneously moves and stands at standstill. Klingbiel’s large-scale painting is a true palimpsest in that it leaves visible only the thinnest traces of each layer—ink, gel, paint—which permeate the wooden surface equally, without competing for primacy. A true palimpsest, like this one, is a democracy without a single leader, a world into itself and the only piece in the show unconnected with the others.
The cornucopia of techniques used here—mono-typing, wood-blocking, painting, collaging—continues to grow and perfect itself. Klingbiel’s most recent show is a testament to the endlessness of art which can create unmeasurable depths on the dull, hard, flat surfaces.
- Anna Friedrich
Mutual Art, Karl Klingbiel: Every Force Evolves a Form, 2022
Mind The Image, Maybaum Gallery Opens With a Formal Dimension, 2019
Brooklyn Street Art, Masters and Pelavin Present: “Legend Tripping” A Group Show, 2013
Long Island Pulse Rive Gauche, Bklyn Roberts Szot and Karl Klingbiel, 2013
The Brooklyn Rail, Abstraction’s Ambiguity is Its Own Reward, 2011
Brandeis Now, The Rose Art Museum’s Empires and Environments, 2008
Form, Power and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work University of Iowa Press, 2010