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A comprehensive solo show reveals the full range of the Austrian American artist’s oeuvre, extending far beyond her early work in Kineticism.
Press Release
As an outstanding representative of Viennese Kineticism, Erika Giovanna Klien (1900–1957) soon shot to international fame. Her passion for the theater and dance led to innovative stage designs and complex depictions of bodies in motion. From 1929 Klien lived in New York, which resulted in an increased focus on urban spaces and social issues. The exhibition at the Lower Belvedere shines a spotlight on every facet of the painter, graphic designer, and art educator’s oeuvre and presents the latest research on her life and work.
General Director Stella Rollig: Some forty years since Erika Giovanna Klien’s first solo exhibition in a museum, this show presents a contemporary perspective on the artist and invites visitors to learn about new facets of her creative output. In the University of Applied Arts Vienna—Collection and Archive and the Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici in Rome, we found two very competent partner institutions for this exhibition project.
Klien is considered the most important representative of Kineticism, an abstract art movement developed in the first half of the 1920s at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts that focused on the “rhythmic existence of things.” Under Klien’s analytic gaze, complex sequences of movement showing flying birds, rotating machines, or dancing bodies were transformed into masterly Simultanistic compositions. In 1929 the artist moved to New York, where she earned a living as a progressive art educator. It was then at the latest that she proved herself to be a precise observer of technological progress and the machine-driven dynamism of the modern metropolis, while the economic crisis and world war heightened her awareness of social issues.
The exhibition does not present Klien’s oeuvre according to the chapters of her biography but reflects the central themes in her work and illustrates how the artist created such a compelling and diverse, at times also interdisciplinary, body of work over the course of almost four decades, the full extent of which deserves our attention and greater visibility, according to the curator Verena Gamper.
The solo show reveals continuities where her biography might lead us to expect breaks. For instance, Klien was interested in the theater and dance throughout her life, and her study of children’s creative expression was another constant in her oeuvre. Consistent in her choice of subjects but open to inspiration from various disciplines and cultures, Klien developed a rich and diverse body of work—even beyond Kineticism.
An exhibition of the Belvedere, Vienna, in collaboration with the University of Applied Arts—Collection and Archive, Vienna, and the Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici, Rome.
Installation view "Erika Giovanna Klien. All Is Movement", Lower Belvedere
Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
Installation view "Erika Giovanna Klien. All Is Movement", Lower Belvedere
Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
Installation view "Erika Giovanna Klien. All Is Movement", Lower Belvedere
Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
Installation view "Erika Giovanna Klien. All Is Movement", Lower Belvedere
Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
Installation view "Erika Giovanna Klien. All Is Movement", Lower Belvedere
Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
Installation view "Erika Giovanna Klien. All Is Movement", Lower Belvedere
Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
Installation view "Erika Giovanna Klien. All Is Movement", Lower Belvedere
Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
Installation view "Erika Giovanna Klien. All Is Movement", Lower Belvedere
Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
Installation view "Erika Giovanna Klien. All Is Movement", Lower Belvedere
Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
Installation view "Erika Giovanna Klien. All Is Movement", Lower Belvedere
Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
Erika Giovanna Klien, Kinetic Figure, 1927
Collection Leitner, Vienna
Erika Giovanna Klien, Diving Bird, 1939
Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
Erika Giovanna Klien, Klessheim Dispatch: Tango Dream, May 1927
Collection and Archive, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Erika Giovanna Klien, Silex Abstraction, 1935
Oesterreichische Nationalbank/Kunstsammlung, Foto: OeNB/Graphisches Atelier Neumann
Erika Giovanna Klien, Bird Flight, 1951/52
Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna
Erika Giovanna Klien, Women on Horseback and a Man Wearing a Top Hat, 1925
Wien Museum, Photo: TimTom, Wien Museum
Erika Giovanna Klien, Diving Bird, c. 1939
From the collection of Millicent Hamburger
Erika Giovanna Klien, The Driller, 1933
Galerie Sylvia Kovacek, Vienna
Erika Giovanna Klien, Head of a Dancer (Awakening), 1923
Collection Pabst, Vienna
Erika Giovanna Klien teaching at the Duncan School in Salzburg-Klessheim, 1927
Collection Pabst, Vienna
Erika Giovanna Klien, Brooklyn Bridge, 1931
Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier
Erika Giovanna Klien, Locomotive, 1925
Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier
Portrait of Erika Giovanna Klien, 1925/26
© Sammlung Pabst
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