Berkeley, CA, August 12, 2005 - The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) is pleased to present the latest exhibition in the MATRIX Program for Contemporary Art. MATRIX 218: Carla Klein Scape is the first solo museum exhibition in the United States for Rotterdam-based painter Carla Klein. The exhibition is on view in the MATRIX Gallery from September 18 through November 6, 2005.

Klein's large-scale, predominantly monochromatic images hover between abstraction and representation. At once expressionistic and emotionless, her paintings suggest wide-open spaces and indistinct landscapes. Klein works from digital and analogue photographs which she takes and develops herself, sometimes manipulating the color and size of the image. She describes herself as "a horrible, messy photographer" and
often incorporates the unintentional blurriness and blemishes that emerge during the developing process into her paintings. Her paintings are primarily devoid of figures or any clear living presence; as she says, by adding a person "it becomes an image about the person, like a story. I don't want a story."

Instead, Klein's paintings reveal only suggestions of life and movement. The locations and subjects she depicts are often points of departure or transitory landmarks, such as airport terminals and runways, roads, and bridges. These subjects seem inspired by the genre of photographic postcards, images that suggest more an ideal than any real site or actual experience. Her paintings exploit the ambiguity of wide expanses of space-whether stretches of water or sky or light-filled architectural spaces-which she anchors with strong but simple geometric elements.

Some of Klein's paintings for her MATRIX exhibition were created during her residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts earlier this year. Her work was featured in a major group exhibition in 2004 at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, and during 2005 in Vanishing Point at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. MATRIX 218: Carla Klein Scape was curated by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, former MATRIX Curator and now director and chief curator of the Aspen Art Museum.

Public Programs
Sunday, September 18, 4 p.m.
Artist's Talk
Gallery 1
Artist Carla Klein, former MATRIX Curator Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, and special guest Michael Darling, assistant curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, will engage in a conversation about Klein's recent work and contemporary painting's relationship to photography.