Astrid Klein

For more than three decades, Astrid Klein has been deeply engaged in the relationship between text and image. In 1972, she began writing down thoughts about literary, aesthetic, philosophical, and scientific essays that she had read. Eventually she began combining her own text with text by other writers, which she then incorporated into her paintings. For example, in Broken Heart (1980) Klein used excerpts from Arno Schmidt’s Zettels Traum (1970), juxtaposing the text with sexualized images of women from movies and porn magazines from the 1960s and '70s. Klein has continued the dialog in more recent work with her large-scale neon sculptures and light installations. The typography, overlaid elements, and blurring refer to the archaeological layers of thinking and perception, of memory and oblivion, and of the difference between self-awareness and subconscious thought.