Palimpsest - Recent Paintings by Karl Klingbiel

San Francisco, CA - Maybaum Gallery is pleased to present Palimpsest, a solo exhibition by contemporary New York based artist Karl Klingbiel. In his premier solo show at Maybaum Gallery, Klingbiel presents his most
dynamic series to date. The show includes 7 paintings and 3 multi-panel wall sculptures that reveal the process behind each work. Using a router to carve into his wood panels, Klingbiel unveils the mystery of his wall paintings. A combination of woodcarving, mono-printing, collage and oil paint applied with squeegee, traditional brushes and airbrush.

The paintings are in essence structures, akin to the structures that comprise the physical, historical, and psychic structures that make up our daily lives, but which we cannot see in the aggregate; we see fragments of them, as they float to the perceivable surface of daily experience and our ongoing frames of reference. These structures change and evolve, doubling up on each other, changing and replacing each other. They are in essence palimpsests, things written and then written over again, continuously, until what we are left with are the thin tracings of points on a map we cannot fully know. As paintings these structures become more or less meditative objects that serve as markers to our perceptions of the phenomenal—both concrete and virtual—world that surrounds us.

Diving into Klingbiel's multi-layered work, they reflect the complexity of a reality that can only be experienced through the trace elements on the surface of things, and how those trace elements may or may not reflect the networks and complexities that are too covert or invisible or vast to comprehend. What is “reality,” the phenomenal world, made up of? It can’t be fully known; we just see fragments of it, and incomplete traces of networks — virtual, physical, metaphysical — and this is what makes up the surface of experiential time and by extension the actual, physical surface of the paintings. The paintings are intended to be in a state of ambiguity that actually points away or strives against that ambiguity.

Klingbiel derives inspiration from pre-modern Renaissance paintings, Tibetan thanka painting, maps, technical illustrations, Flemish tapestry. His works have a layer and depth that is worthy of his impressive resume. A graduate of Yale University painting program and part of the MOMA permanent collection, Klingbiel has been recognized as a note worthy artist by curators and collectors alike. His work can be found in public and private collections throughout the US and abroad.

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