Ray kleinlein

American, b. 1969

Ray Kleinlein was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1969. He studied at the Ohio State University and the Columbus College of Art and Design, and earned his master’s degree in painting and art history at Ohio University.

He had his first one man show while still in graduate school. Since then he’s exhibited extensively in one person and group shows in galleries and museums throughout the United States, and in many art fairs such as Art Miami, Expo Chicago, and the Seattle Art Fair.

Kleinlein has won numerous awards and prizes including Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowships (twice) and a prize in the Miami University National Young Painters Competition. His work has also been chosen for juried shows by prominent figures such as artists David Reed and William Bailey, Hirshhorn Director James Demetrion, and New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl.

Ray’s work has received national attention through features in the magazines New American Paintings and Southern Living, and has been consistently praised by critics through reviews in journals and periodicals such as The Charlotte Observer, The Columbus Dispatch, and The Commercial Appeal.

Kleinlein’s paintings are in hundreds of corporate and private collections throughout the world and the collections of The Canton Museum of Fine Art, The Zanesville Museum of Art, The Southern Ohio Museum, and Davidson College.

Ray lives with his wife and two children near Nashville, Tennessee.

Artist Statement

”Representational still life painting is part of a long-standing tradition. As a contemporary artist who chooses to work within an established style and genre, my challenge is to create work which celebrates tradition while simultaneously transcending the sense of nostalgia attributed to it.

The formal language I employ is a synthesis of traditional and contemporary aesthetics, particularly those associated with geometric abstraction and minimalism. Some paintings contain wry references to particular modern painters (a painting of striped shirts is a nod to Bridget Riley and a creased shopping bag recalls Mark Rothko, for example). While from a distance (or reproduced in images) my paintings may seem illusionistic, the technique denies neither the physical texture of the paint nor the flat surface of the canvas. In this way my paintings integrate traditional illusionism and contemporary formalism: they are convincing representations of actual objects as well as abstract arrangements of light, shape, and color.

Though the subjects are chosen for their abstract visual qualities, decontextualized, and re-presented in a neutral space, no object is free of associations. As material fragments of human life they become signifiers for culture, class, identity, desire, gender, and the body. Since the subjects are taken from the visual landscape of my everyday life, autobiographic narratives are sometimes suggested.

Ultimately my paintings celebrate the simple act of looking at the overlooked and the pleasures derived from seeing ordinary things in an extraordinary way. As affirmations of the beauty of unremarkable things, the paintings enthusiastically embrace human culture and the material world while suggesting a life-affirming optimism, reverence, humor, and an underlying spirituality.”