--- type: magazine_content title: Erika Giovanna Klien language: en url: "https://www.belvedere.at/en/stories/erika-giovanna-klien" --- # Erika Giovanna Klien ![Image](https://www.belvedere.at/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/2026-09/Portr%C3%A4t_Klien-NYC-march-1925_26_0.jpg.webp?itok=I3_KFEkt) In Focus: Understanding Movement **Category:** Exhibition Artist **Published:** 23.09.2026 **Reading time:** 3 min read A bird spreads its wings. Yet rather than capturing a single moment, an entire sequence of movement seems to come into view: contours overlap, lines continue, shapes shift. It is almost as if this rhythmic motion through space could be paused, taken apart, and examined more closely. **Text:** Lisa Ebner-Kollmann Throughout her career, Erika Giovanna Klien returned time and again to the movement of birds in flight. She drew and painted wings, aerodynamic bodies, and sequences of movement, moving freely between figuration and abstraction, to the point that some of these works are difficult to date today. For Klien, it was not simply a matter of depicting a bird in flight. She wanted to understand how different types of movement worked: gliding, turning, diving. She observed and analyzed, ultimately translating what she saw into lines, planes, and geometric forms. ![Abstract painting featuring a dynamic ribbon-like form composed of overlapping geometric shapes in muted gray, beige, brown, and orange tones. Stretching across the canvas, the composition suggests the motion of a bird in flight, conveying movement, rhythm, and speed. — Erika Giovanna Klien, Bird Flight, 1951/52 — Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna](https://www.belvedere.at/sites/default/files/styles/full_content_width_no_crop/public/2026-07/Erika%20Giovanna%20Klien_Vogelflug_Belvedere.jpg.webp?itok=d9pNmcd0) ![Erika Giovanna Klien, Diving Bird, 1939 — Photo: Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna](https://www.belvedere.at/sites/default/files/styles/full_content_width_no_crop/public/2025-08/9547_Klien_Diving%20Bird_1939.jpg.webp?itok=yPtM6eBv) ![Portrait Erika Giovanna Klien, 1925/26 — Portrait of Erika Giovanna Klien, 1925/26 — © Sammlung Pabst](https://www.belvedere.at/sites/default/files/styles/full_content_width_no_crop/public/2026-09/Portr%C3%A4t_Klien-NYC-march-1925_26_0.jpg.webp?itok=VWA03an8) **Erika Giovanna Klien** (1900–1957) is considered one of the most important representatives of Viennese Kineticism. Born in present-day Trentino, she moved to Vienna with her family in 1919 and studied under *Franz Čižek* at the *School of Arts and Crafts*. It was in Čižek’s course on “*Ornamental Morphology*” that Kineticism emerged in the early 1920s – an art movement centered on engaging with an increasingly fast-paced modern world. Yet Klien never settled on a single visual language. For her, Kineticism did not simply mean conveying an impression of speed and movement. She wanted to understand its underlying principles and make them visible. This was also what, in her view, set it apart from Futurism: movement became the subject of close observation and analysis. Kineticism remained an important starting point, but it did not define the limits of her artistic practice. In 1940, she described this development as a liberation: > “I am neither a Cubist, nor an Expressionist, nor a Kineticist, nor any other kind of ‘-ist,’ but simply a painter who can paint everything \[…\]. It is as though I had been incarcerated in the prison of formal art movements and suddenly a ‘hatch’ has sprung open, and I am gushing out into freedom.” When Klien moved to New York in 1929, her visual language continued to evolve, without abandoning the questions that had long occupied her. The metropolis, with its skyscrapers, bridges, streets, and machines, offered new subjects and sources of inspiration. At the same time, social issues and the realities of everyday life and work increasingly came into focus. At the progressive *New School for Social Research*, where Klien began teaching in 1931, she encountered the monumental murals of *José Clemente Orozco* and *Thomas Hart Benton*. Their socially critical themes and clear, accessible visual narratives appear to have made a lasting impression on her. Subsequently, the working world, road construction, and the technical infrastructure of the modern metropolis became subjects in her work, alongside their opposites: artisanal, domestic, and distinctly agricultural activities. Movement remained a constant but became part of a broader engagement with the world around her. ![Black-and-white abstract depiction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Overlapping lines, curves, and geometric shapes form a dynamic composition, suggesting the bridge’s cables and structure dissolving into motion. — Erika Giovanna Klien, Brooklyn Bridge, 1931 — Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier](https://www.belvedere.at/sites/default/files/styles/full_content_width_no_crop/public/2026-08/Erika%20Giovanna%20Klien_Brookly%20Bridge_1931_Yale%20University%20Art%20Gallery.jpg.webp?itok=7RF-Nm7R) ![Painting featuring overlapping figures, animals, and symbols in vivid blue, red, green, yellow, and ochre tones. At the center, a horse and rider are surrounded by stylized heads, birds, wagon wheels, and sun motifs. Angular shapes and bright colors create a sense of movement, variety, and a densely layered narrative scene. — Erika Giovanna Klien, Women on Horseback and a Man Wearing a Top Hat, 1925 — Wien Museum, Photo: TimTom, Wien Museum](https://www.belvedere.at/sites/default/files/styles/full_content_width_no_crop/public/2026-07/Ex_53443_EGK_HMW_171362_001.jpg.webp?itok=pofy4DUz) Her long-standing work as an art educator was more than simply a way to earn a living alongside her artistic practice. While sitting in on Čižek’s *Youth Art Class* at the *Vienna School of Arts and Crafts*, she was already exploring how children perceive and create. Later, during her many years as a teacher, she continued to explore perceptual and creative processes in children’s development. Children’s art, in turn, became a source of inspiration for her own work. Klien believed that creative activity should not be reserved for the few. > “Every person should work practically and creatively. The division of labor is not the division of people,” she wrote to her son Walter in 1948. ![Stylized illustration of a construction worker operating a jackhammer. The figure is shown in a bent posture on a sandy-colored surface. In the background are brick structures, arched tunnel-like forms, and a mine cart on tracks. The image uses muted shades of brown, gray, and red. — Erika Giovanna Klien, The Driller, 1933 — Galerie Sylvia Kovacek, Vienna](https://www.belvedere.at/sites/default/files/styles/full_content_width_no_crop/public/2026-07/36042-___-___.jpg.webp?itok=U_ZNLl3y) The exhibition **“Erika Giovanna Klien. All Is Movement”** at the Lower Belvedere was developed in collaboration with the *Istituto Italiano di Studi Germanici* in Rome and the *University of Applied Arts Vienna – Collection and Archive*. The most comprehensive exhibition of Klien’s work to date presents the artist’s versatility through a broad selection of works and the latest research. Rather than dividing her work into a European and an American phase, the exhibition highlights continuities across decades, media, and places in which she lived and worked. Alongside well-known works, the exhibition presents others that have never before been shown publicly. Erika Giovanna Klien was not only a key figure in a historical art movement, but a tireless observer who sought to understand how the world functions and how we perceive it. Her work shows how consistently she revisited these questions from new perspectives, and in doing so moved far beyond the boundaries of Kineticism. Exhibition Erika Giovanna Klien Lower Belvedere 18 September 2026 - 31 January 2027 [ To the exhibition ](https://www.belvedere.at/en/erika-giovanna-klien) [ Tickets ](https://www.belvedere.at/en/tickets?location%5B%5D=3)