THURSDAY, March 28, 2024
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Up close with Klose

Up close with Klose

British artist Will Klose, who’s lived in Thailand for over a decade and has his studio on Chiang Mai’s outskirts, explores the psychological drama found in domestic settings in the exhibition “Between Intimacy and Estrangement”.

 It’s at H Gallery Bangkok today through November 26.
In meticulously painted scenes, both with and without a human presence, Klose employs sharp contrasts of light and a gradated palette of colour.
“Between Intimacy and Estrangement” carries a deliberated framing of the immediate space of an individual through limited expanses and an aura of the wistful. 
Dark interiors reach out to sun-drenched suburban housing estates and distant horizon lines, the frames of the windows suggesting a fragile confinement. 
Klose’s paintings have always demonstrated his interest in structural thresholds and whether the play of light and shadow is abrupt or softly melancholic, the limits of difference between inner and other worlds is acute and compelling. 
Klose recently resolved to intensify his methods by limiting the subject matter. A previous series titled “Disquiet” integrated found imagery with observed views, while the earlier works from “Witthayu” maintained a searching ambivalence prompted by the artist’s relocation to the seemingly infinite expanses of Bangkok. 
The paintings of the current series were disciplined as a study of how the familiar could be mined for potential previously not noted. For example, Klose’s wife returns, but less as a portrait of a person than a cipher for contemplating a body’s relation to architectural space. 
Bathed in shadows and physically de-emphasised, her back is turned in one work and moved towards the edge in others. 
For the first time, Klose includes self-portraits, including a portrait of a portrait that reflects on his very medium and method.
Find out more at (085) 021 5508 and www.HGalleryBkk.com.
 

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