The world in all its plenitude

Heather Gaudio Fine Art is pleased to present Martin Kline: The world in all its plenitude, the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. The public is invited to attend an opening reception on Saturday, May 3, 4-6pm, and the exhibition will remain on view through June 14 th . A fully illustrated catalogue with an essay written by art critic and poet Carter Ratcliff accompanies the exhibition.

…ever since he made his first mature work, Kline has felt free to make paintings that are not flat and sculptures that are powerfully pictorial. He is not just inventive. He is reliably – startlingly – original¹.

The show brings together thirty-nine works executed between 1997 and 2025, surveying Kline’s long-standing engagement with encaustic. Kline’s output has consistently been one of working in series, creating several paintings, drawings and sculpture surrounding a theme or idea. At times he has revisited these themes to expand his material investigations, technical mastery and visual explorations. The distinguishing motif in the paintings and sculptures presented in this show, regardless of the year or series they belong to, is that they all share in the color blue. Arguably one of the favorite colors on the spectrum, blue has for millennia captivated the human eye and carried a special allure for its symbolic and emotive qualities. From ancient China and Egypt to the Celtic times, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Baroque periods, from the Industrial Revolution and the nineteenth century to the modern and contemporary era, blue has fascinated artists, musicians and writers. Sourced from cobalt, lapis lazuli, indigo, ultramarine and other materials, blue can transform into varying hues: cyan, navy, turquoise, aqua, midnight blue, sky blue, royal blue and aquamarine.

Kline’s nimble use of the color takes its hue and shade ranges in different directions, accentuating its characteristics and evocative nature with his adroit use of encaustic. Whether applied in flat bold brushstrokes, dripped or layered to create textured surfaces, Kline modulates the color and manipulates the material to create a vast range of visual experiences. Some grided paintings are structures that take on a retro feel with lighter and darker tones and hues, such as Blue order and blue and white impression. The brushstrokes create a patchwork of tetris-like tiles seeming to compete for space. A mixture of values and tones in other panels such as Blue Grid are not as delineated and appear to meld into one another. These networks are transformed into more complex systems in Blue mosaico (Tondo) and in the camo-bot series such as Patchwork blue and Camo bluebot.

Razzle dazzle may be visually related to the latter two but is also part of another seminal body of work by the artist, the Hammock paintings. In this large panel, Kline’s line of enquiry comes from a narrative referenced in Leo Steinberg’s essay Other criteria. In it, he touches on the 19th-century artist Thomas Eakins’ addressing the question whether painting and sculpture should have the same moral standing as traditionally defined manual labor, and not just be considered an activity of leisure or pleasure. Kline’s Hammock paintings are created on actual canvas service hammocks, some dating back to WWII, that the artist has collected over the years. Razzle dazzle, with its honey-combed surface and blue color patterns, camouflages the hammock on the panel, keeping the object used for work and /or leisure not readily apparent.

Audiences familiar with Kline’s artistic trajectory will enjoy viewing the deep, midnight blue, almost black The prussian blues (II), an encaustic on linen that would be a precursor to an important series in Kline’s oeuvre, the white linen, or Tabula rasa, paintings. Other works on view include the artist’s signature additive layered Bloom, Jewel, and Leda paintings, with their surfaces so textured they become quasi sculptural, where shadow plays an important part in the visual engagement. When does a textured painting become a sculpture? The coup de grâce that drives this concept home is Diagonal blue growth on canvas, a painting the artist cast into a unique bronze and finished with a rich blue patina to make it look like a painting.