David Klein Gallery

David Klein Gallery, 163 Townsend Street, Birmingham, Michigan, is pleased to present Leif Ritchey, Sky Studio, March 1 – April 5, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, March 1st from 4 to 7pm. Leif Ritchey is an American contemporary artist whose practice spans across the disciplines of art, music, and fashion. He is in that generation of artists whose practice is defined by its commitment to a multi-disciplinary approach. A devoted colorist, Leif is known for his use of pale pastel colors and manipulated pours. Various materials including textiles, papers and bits of dried paint find their way into the composition, resulting in a densely textured and layered surface. My process involves layering, imprinting, and excavating…building and removing layers. In doing this I can weave the collage materials and paint with the energy of the moment. - Leif Ritchey February 2025 From 2002 – 2009 Ritchey and his wife owned and operated a fashion line called Leif & Tooya, which was recognized for erasing the boundaries between design and craft. He is a founding member, with his father James Ritchey, of the musical group Shades, an Ann Arbor based improvisational band. Leif notes "colors are colors and objects are objects, they dance together make music - a jam. I listen to the music and lose myself in it, dance along, live it, colors and forms find alchemy unknown". Ritchey’s work has been exhibited in New York, NY; Los Angeles, CA; Detroit, MI; Torino, Italy; Copenhagen, Denmark; Luxembourg and Singapore. A native of Ann Arbor, Ritchey maintains a studio in Detroit.

An Art Stripped Bare is an intimate survey of Robert Motherwell’s work on paper from 1965 – 1980. The show’s title comes from Motherwell’s essay What Abstract Art Means to Me (1951). “An art stripped bare” is how Motherwell described one of the most striking aspects of abstract art’s appearance; the absence of objects and subject, an art detached from the natural world. The nine works on paper that comprise this exhibition exemplify this “nakedness”. Motherwell created each work utilizing a series of elegant gestures in a variety of mediums; oil, ink, charcoal, and gouache. An Art Stripped Bare is the first Motherwell exhibition in metropolitan Detroit since the early 1970s.

David Klein Gallery, 163 Townsend Street, Birmingham, MI is pleased to present an exhibition of over twenty of Al Held’s rarely seen works on paper from 1960. Consisting of only one or two swiftly applied brushstrokes of India ink on wax paper; these lean and organic compositions offer an intriguing preamble to Held’s more recognizable hard-edged, overlapping geometric abstractions from the late 1960s.

David Klein Gallery, 163 Townsend St, Birmingham, Michigan, is pleased to announce the opening of New Work: Matthew Hawtin, Sylvain Malfroy-Camine, Benjamin Pritchard. All three artists are Detroit based abstract painters with styles ranging from boldly gestural to coolly minimal. Together they demonstrate the full range of contemporary abstract painting.

David Klein Gallery, 163 Townsend Street, Birmingham, Michigan is pleased to announce the opening of LUXE, an exhibition of sculpture and drawings by Mary-Ann Monforton from her recent series, Everybody is a Star. Monforton presents her tongue-in-cheek “luxury” line of bags and shoes fabricated with wire mesh, plaster gauze, paint and an occasional steel spike. Her Hermes Birkin, Chanel Bucket and Fendi Baguette are humorous Claes Oldenburg-style takes on familiar objects which, in this case, are the sought-after accessories and shoes avidly collected by status seeking fashionable consumers. In recent years the trend setting influencers on social media have successfully promoted what appears to be an insatiable global desire for luxury goods. Monforton has taken her spoofs of these extravagant items to a new level with her joyful super-sized renditions of designer shoes and bags. Also, along for the ride are her colorful starry-eyed drawings of the same desirable goods: a Gucci Jackie, a Louis Vuitton Speedy and Valentino Garavani appear with other favorites. The installation features a 40-inch gold-painted wire mesh and plaster gauze Chandelier floating over the fabulous items on display. It is a charming addition to the series and reminiscent of the splendid décor you’ll experience in the elegant boutiques and shoe salons found in cities like Milan, New York, and Paris. The real and the fake is constantly at play in my latest body of work. LUXE explores the psychology of fame, fortune, mega-wealth, and privileged consumption. The broader concepts of ascribing value to things is played out in this line of luxury goods that defy perfection and are rife with failure and humor …Mary-Ann Monforton 2022 Mary-Ann Monforton is an artist and curator. She was the Associate Publisher of BOMB Magazine from 1995 to 2021. Previous to that, she was involved in the NYC downtown art scene working as a music promoter from the late 70s through the early 80s. Monforton has exhibited her artwork in New York and elsewhere since 2014 and has curated numerous exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles since 1985. She was born in Windsor, Canada and raised in Detroit, Michigan. She holds a BFA from Aquinas College, Grand Rapids, MI. Monforton was a resident of New York City from 1974 to 2021. Mary-Ann Monforton currently lives and works in Detroit.

David Klein Gallery, 163 Townsend Street, Birmingham, Michigan, is pleased to announce the opening of Scherzo, a presentation of new paintings by the Detroit based artist, Sylvain Malfroy-Camine. A reception for the artist will take place on Saturday, October 22, 5-7 PM. The artist notes: “Scherzo is a kind of musical composition that also means ‘joke’ in Italian. In titling the show this way, I hope to imply music in the work shown, but also to lightly question the amusing notion of music’s relationship to painting, since paintings are notoriously silent.” Scherzo features Malfroy-Camine’s most recent paintings on a grand scale, with a palette reminiscent of the Impressionists and Pointillists of the early 20th century. The work also reveals a relationship to Larry Poons’ colorfield paintings of the early 1960s with their painterly dots and ellipses. “I make work improvisationally, allowing marks to build upon each other or fall into a din of chaos. I mix colors slowly on the palette, read the activity taking place in the painting, and deliberate my next moves as I decide where the painting ought to go. In this way, I don’t presuppose the painting, and allow it to move by some chance and by some choice, until it arrives into harbor, freshly painted, or dinged and dented…” Sylvain Malfroy-Camine, October 2022 Sylvain Malfroy-Camine received his BA in Art at University of Massachusetts, Boston and an MFA in Painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. A first-generation American, Malfroy-Camine grew up near Boston and spent childhood summers visiting family in France. Time spent there left him with the impressions of the light and landscapes of that country, impressions which remain with him to this day.

“Being out of my element is quite scary. It keeps me on my toes. Printmaking definitely fills that need. It allows me to shake it up a bit.” – Kelly Reemtsen David Klein Gallery, 163 Townsend St, Birmingham, MI is pleased to present a retrospective exhibition of Kelly Reemtsen’s prints and multiples. Over the past decade, Kelly has explored every tool in the printmaking toolbox; woodcut, screen print, lithography, and etching. This exhibition will include rare examples of her first large scale woodcuts Splitting Hairs and You Wouldn’t from 2012, unique hand painted etchings Twister Sister, Ground Breaking, and Birthday Girl from 2015 and her most recent screen prints Smashing and Dig It. In addition to prints, the exhibition will include important examples of Kelly’s sculptures – Xanax Rainbow (2012), Fuck The System (2015), and her most recent work Taking Shape (2020). Kelly Reemtsen MULTIPLES will run concurrently with her exhibition of new paintings A VIEW FROM L.A.at David Klein Gallery Detroit.

David Klein Gallery, 163 Townsend St, Birmingham, Michigan is pleased to present Emmy Bright Alone Together (Views from the Bottom of the Pool). This is Bright’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and will feature a new body of work created during the COVID – 19 Pandemic. In a recent conversation, Emmy Bright explored the origins of this new body of work and explained her elaborate working methods: One of my favorite things to do this past summer was to sit at the bottom of the pool. I would sit on the bottom holding the lowest rung of the ladder. And I’d keep myself there underwater until I was out of breath. I love looking up through the water to a rippled surface - even though you can’t see much from there. It is a very quiet and still place - with little sound too, but a lot can be felt - the temperature and currents of water. And it is very blue, or blue green or even dark depending on the time of day. I’m turning more and more to color for a certain kind of feeling. These drawings use line, movement, color, and removal to evoke intense emotion visually, rather than through text as I’ve done in the past. I use an elaborate inlay process where two sheets are colored, then repeatedly deconstructed and repaired with tape. What was cut from one panel appears in the other panel and vice versa. And the tape picks up tinted fingerprints, revealing my body and the work of repair. Some pieces were colored with special markers and brushes, but more and more I’ve been using my hands to move the ink across the paper. These works pay homage to places of beauty, visual sensuality, rest, and spaces for feeling and sensation. Amidst the fury of the now, I’m trying to make spaces to think, feel and breathe. Emmy Bright works in drawing, writing, print and performance. In all of these mediums, she explores the problems of empathy and the problems of boundaries. She often works with opposing binaries, like aloneness and togetherness, parts and wholes, breakage and repair, distance and connection. By working with opposites, she draws attention to how they connect, intermingle and depend on one another. In this current body of work, these opposites manifest as two sides of each panel (left and right or top and bottom.) The work contains strong variegated strokes of monochromatic color that are repeatedly cut into then reassembled and then taped, and these acts of removal and repair feel especially symbolic in the difficulty of the now. Bright has produced projects and exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Internationally. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art, Vermont Studio Center, New Urban Arts, University of Hawaii, and Haystack School of Crafts. She is currently an Artist in Residence and Head of Print Media at Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI). She lives and works in Southwest Detroit. Image caption: Emmy Bright, Between Us (This Side of the Blue) - 2020, Marker and tape on Yupo, 43 x 52 inches

David Klein Gallery is pleased to present Al Held: Watercolors. This exhibition offers the opportunity to view rare watercolor paintings by Held, which were created at his studio in Camerata di Todi, Italy in the early 1990s.