David Klein Gallery

Through painting, I hope to honor rituals carried across generations and oceans. Rituals that connect people to land, water, ancestry, and community. - Christian Curiel, 2026 Ritual Migration brings together a new series of paintings by Christian Curiel that explores ideas of the sea as threshold, a site of human passage and displacement. The intensely hued and luminous works of varying scale, made with oil, acrylic and mixed media on panel over the last two years, grow out of images of the Cuban raft migration from the late 1980s and early 1990s. This imagery continues to resonate within the shifting political and geographic conditions of the Atlantic crescent, in Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela. This interest in transitional states extends from earlier series, where Curiel explored other thresholds or “in-between” states such as home to diaspora, childhood to adulthood, remembrance to forgetting, innocence to experience, or exile to belonging. Continuing within this framework in Ritual Migration, the Atlantic crescent becomes a repository of memory and history, a site of historical crossing shaped by colonial histories and migration routes, what scholar Jonathan Howard describes as “the Deep”, the sea understood not simply as metaphor, but as an ongoing lived condition through which histories persist, accumulate, and remain. Ritual Migration reflects on personal and history, myth, ritual, and lived experience, honoring those who cross physical and spiritual seas in search of refuge, identity, and new beginnings. Christian Curiel 2026 Even the painting process mirrors this structure, employing techniques of a painterly “in-between” through which dreamlike images develop gradually across layered surfaces. Working primarily in oil on linen, Curiel allows the surface to remain visible, letting it function as atmosphere, skin tone, or mid-tone within the composition. An image is built around the natural color of the linen, so that figures seem to surface from within it. Curiel experiments with water poured into acrylic layers that are laid flat on the ground. Where the water accumulates, the paint cannot dry. When the water is later wiped away, it leaves organic marks that resemble droplets or erosion patterns. In the larger triptychs Ritual Migration and Crash Boat, figures appear in and around the sea and seashore, in inner tubes, makeshift vessels, and improvised crafts, portraying a loose, unresolved narrative in which the sea becomes a metaphor for passage and a psychological and historical space shaped by urgency, danger, endurance, and survival. Within these scenes subtle details begin to surface-plastic debris, fragments of discarded objects or belongings, pointing to environmental, psychological, and ritual undercurrents; offerings of food, suggesting moments of preparation or ritual; and playing cards divining some unknown, alternative, future. – Wayne Northcross, 2026 About Christian Curiel Inspired by magical realism and the current human condition Christian Curiel’s work mixes the real and unreal aspects of dream states as reflections on Latin American cultural and literary references with elements of ritual, mystery, and symbolism. His work presents a composite of themes related to migration, immigration, belonging, and identity placed within the complex, highly emotionally coded world of youth. Evoking a dreamlike state representing the confusion and fragility of coming of age, the paintings embody the struggle for identity and a sense of belonging. Curiel’s works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and institutions in the U.S. and abroad including Fondation Cartier, Paris, France; The Bass Museum, Miami FL; MOCA Miami, FL; the Pérez Museum, Miami, FL; The Americas Society, New York, NY; El Museo Del Barrio, New York, NY and NXTHVN, New Haven CT. Major Collections include Fondation Cartier, Paris, France; The Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Fl; The Dean Valentine Collection, L.A. California; The Hort Family Collection, New York, NY and Jean- Pierre Lehmann Collection and the Jeanna Bullock Collection, Russia. Christian Curiel was born in Puerto Rico to Cuban parents. The family moved to Miami where Christian was raised before heading off to Yale University in the early 2000’s. His passion for education has earned him professor roles at Yale, Southern Connecticut State University, University of New Haven, and Broward College among others. In addition to his solo studio practice, Curiel is a member of the 4-artist collective called Fe Cu Op, who have produced works together for over a decade. He lives and works in New Haven, CT.

When everything is in place ecologically, socially and agriculturally we can accept the absurdity of being human. – Robert Schefman, 2026 For his second solo exhibition with David Klein Gallery, Robert Schefman employs nature as an analogy for investigating the human experience. His previous explorations shed a light on maintaining personal histories in the age of technology while another recent series focused on the hidden world of secrets he collected from anonymous participants. Schefman’s narrative paintings are introspective, using images to convey what it means to be human in a world that is ever changing and yet remains the same. His latest series, The Garden, continues his career spanning investigation into humankind. The garden is never static. It is always in a temporary state, one where planning and constant attention can still result in a return to forest or desert. Even the well-tended garden will eventually decline over time and plants will stop blooming or bearing fruit. My Garden series is a metaphor for one’s personal struggle to create and maintain growth. Like a garden, our time is short and our bodies are more fragile than we care to admit. In response we spend a lifetime looking for meaning and some perspective on time spent in the garden. - Robert Schefman, January 2026 Robert Schefman is a sculptor and painter. After achieving an MFA in sculpture at the University of Iowa, he moved to New York City, setting up a studio and producing large scale minimalist steel sculpture. Gradually adding painting to his studio practice, Schefman has continued to make illusionist narrative work the focus of his work. Fascinated with connecting threads in the social fabric, he uses the illusionist format to address the unchanging reality of sight. Schefman’s work is in numerous private and public collections including The Broad Museum of Art, East Lansing, MI; The Frank Lloyd Wright Smith House, Bloomfield Hills, MI; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; The Flint Museum of Art, Flint, MI; The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC; The Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL; The 19th District Court, Dearborn; Ford Arts Center, Dearborn; Wayne State University, Detroit; The Cooley Law School, Lansing; The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA and private collections in Detroit, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Notable exhibitions include The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, which toured to the Grand Rapids Art Museum, The Orlando Museum of Art and the Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC. Additional exhibitions include The Detroit Institute of Art, The Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Midland Center for The Arts, The Krasl Art Center, Oakland University Art Gallery, The Salamagundi Club, Manifest Research Gallery and David Klein Gallery. A native of Detroit, Schefman earned a BFA from Michigan State University, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Awards include the Kresge Artist Fellowship, Pollack-Krasner Foundation, The Bernard Maas Prize, ArtServe Michigan, The Arts Foundation of Michigan, and the University of Iowa. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and is represented by David Klein Gallery. He lives and works in Metro Detroit.

David Klein Gallery is pleased to announce The Body Remembers, a group exhibition featuring new and recent work by Christian Curiel, Iris Eichenberg, Chelsea Harris, Kim McCarty, Alex McQuilkin, Neha Vedpathak, and Mia Weiner. The exhibition opens with a reception on Saturday, December 13th from 5–8 PM. An artist talk, moderated by Iris Eichenberg, will be held on Saturday, January 17, 2026 (time to be announced). The Body Remembers explores the figure, the landscape, and the porous boundaries between them. Through painting, installation, watercolor, handwoven tapestry, and works on paper, the artists consider how the body serves as a site of memory, intimacy, and encounter. The initial concept of the exhibition emerged from Iris Eichenberg’s most recent body of work: a constellation of portraits on paper, ceramic, and fabric that form an unexpected landscape of objects and images. The interplay between body and place forms the connective thread uniting the artists in the exhibition. These objects collectively reflect the emotional, psychological, and sensorial dimensions of human experience.

David Klein Gallery is pleased to announce Al Held: Constructing Abstraction, an exhibition devoted to a pivotal decade in the career of renowned American painter Al Held (1928–2005). The presentation features eleven rarely exhibited marker drawings from the early 1970s alongside two monumental paintings from the artist’s celebrated Return to Color series of the early 1980s. It is a testament to Held’s resourcefulness that he embraced markers as a serious medium for drawing. While the free-flowing ink of markers is often associated with looseness and informality, Held employed them with rigor and precision. Working with rulers, compasses, and stencils at his drafting table, he produced geometric abstractions that tested the effects of color on volumetric forms and spatial construction. Vivid hues—blue, green, red, orange, and yellow—were balanced with black, brown, and gray to embolden cubes, cylinders, and triangles with airy clarity. These drawings represent Held at the height of his powers, exploring a new medium while looking toward the future. For more than a decade, beginning in 1967, Held devoted himself to his Black and White series, paintings of complex perspectival systems rendered without color. The marker drawings, produced concurrently, offered him an independent yet related field of experimentation. With their vibrant “tripartite lines” and complex spatial configurations, they anticipated Held’s dramatic reintroduction of color to painting at the end of the decade. The exhibition culminates with two large-scale canvases—Trajan’s Court IV (1983) and Vorcex IV (1984)—that represent the next step in Held’s evolution. These works demonstrate his renewed embrace of color and illusionistic space, modeling architectonic forms with bold chromatic intensity and dramatic light and shadow. Together, the drawings and paintings trace a crucial transition in Held’s oeuvre, underscoring his restless pursuit of formal innovation and his lasting influence on the language of abstraction. About the Artist Al Held (1928–2005) was a leading figure in postwar American abstraction, celebrated for his large-scale, spatially complex paintings. After rising to prominence in the 1960s with his hard-edged geometric canvases, Held spent much of the 1970s working extensively on paper before returning to painting in the 1980s with a renewed engagement in color and illusionistic space. His work has been exhibited widely and is included in the permanent collections of major museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Art Institute of Chicago.

David Klein Gallery is pleased to present Prometheus, Absence of Light, a new body of work by Puerto Rican artist Emanuel Torres, on view September 5 – October 11, 2025. The exhibition explores the intersections of light, body, myth, and collective memory, drawing from ancient narratives and the artist’s lived experience. The title of the exhibition takes its cue from the Greco-Roman myth of Prometheus, the Titan who defied the gods to gift humanity with fire, bringing both enlightenment and eternal punishment. This enduring story, echoed in Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Taíno traditions, becomes a lens for Torres’s reflection on the paradox of light: as reason, as mysticism, as a force that illuminates and burns. A pivotal point of inspiration for Torres came from Prometeo (1957), a mural by Mexican painter Rufiño Tamayo, gifted to the University of Puerto Rico and installed in the lobby of the Río Piedras library. “Passing by this work for years, I wonder why it seems so relevant to me now,” Torres notes. That relevance, he suggests, lies in our current moment, one he sees as marked by a profound absence of light, both literal and symbolic. In Puerto Rico, recurring blackouts have left communities in darkness. In Torres’s paintings, a recurring dark figure embodies death, “a corpse that has not yet received the light.” Geometric window-like forms suggest portals or barriers to illumination, a nod to the fragile promise of reason, clarity, or hope. The works’ abstractions of light and body are deeply influenced by Puerto Rican poets such as Francisco Matos Paoli, whose writings entwine the mystical and the political. Accompanying the exhibition will be an essay by art writer Pedro Vélez, who contextualizes Torres’s practice within contemporary discourse on myth, crisis, and resilience. On Saturday, September 6 at 2:00PM at David Klein Gallery, 678 Livernois Street, Ferndale, Torres will join Abel González Fernández, Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, for a conversation about the themes and inspirations In Emanuel Torres: Prometheus Absence of Light. About the Artist Emanuel Torres is a Puerto Rican painter whose practice engages with mythology, history, and the socio-political realities of the Caribbean. Torres’ explorations of light and darkness resonate with urgent contemporary questions of survival, identity, and cultural inheritance. Emanuel Torres holds a BA from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. He continued his studies at the University of Puerto Rico, Cayey. Awards include a 2024 Mellon Foundation Award, a 2018 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and a Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center Residency in 2022. Torres work has been featured in multiple solo and group exhibitions in Puerto Rico, Europe, Japan, and the United States. He lives and works in Puerto Rico. Exhibition Details: Emanuel Torres: Prometheus, Absence of Light September 5 – October 11, 2025 Opening: Friday, September 5, 5–8 PM Artist Talk: Saturday, September 6, 2 PM David Klein Gallery 678 Livernois Street, Ferndale, MI 48220

David Klein Gallery is pleased to announce the grand opening of its new gallery headquarters at 678 Livernois Street, Ferndale, Michigan. A two day opening celebration will take place on Friday, July 11 beginning at 5 PM and continuing into the evening, and on Saturday, July 12 from 12 PM to 6 PM. The opening exhibition features new work on paper by Ferndale-based artist Susan Goethel Campbell and large scale ceramic sculpture by Detroit-based artist Ebitenyefa Baralaye. The celebratory opening event on Friday evening includes a selection of wines by Elie Wine Company. Owner Elie Boudt is a Ferndale resident and gallery neighbor. Sounds provided by At the Moment (atm) and complimentary valet parking will be available. On Saturday the selection of wines by Elie Wine Company continues. There will be an artist talk and gallery walk-through with Ebitenyefa Baralaye and Susan Goethel Campbell at 1:00 PM. “This move is not just about a new space, it’s about investing in Ferndale’s future as a destination for the arts,” says gallery founder David Klein. “With restaurants, cafes, photography studios, framing shops, and a growing creative community, Livernois is becoming a premiere art corridor for metro Detroit. We are thrilled to be part of that momentum and help bring even more visibility to the area. It’s energizing and exciting.” The exhibition Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Foundations + Susan Goethel Campbell, Soundings showcases the work of two artists from distinct backgrounds, ethnicities, and artistic objectives, intersecting at a mid-point in their already-established careers. Campbell’s background in printmaking and Baralaye’s expertise in ceramics have significantly shaped their artistic journeys. However, each artist has utilized their respective crafts to cultivate a distinctive style that transcends their initial disciplines. Campbell’s newest entry into her continuing investigation of life’s natural cycles began during her recent residency on the Greek Island of Skopelos, where the heat and light-drenched environment called into being some of the artist’s most vibrant and exuberant work to date. Intense colors, like those she observed in the sea and in the brilliant bougainvillea growing against the stark white of stuccoed buildings, create an expression of pure chromatic joy. Ebitenyefe Baralay’s mixed media and ceramic artworks mark a clear contrast to Campbells’ in spirit, material and ambition. In contrast to Campbell’s lyrical reflections on nature’s evanescence, Baralaye’s solid and silent beings present as avatars of permanence. These stately human forms emerge, Lazarus-like, from Baralaye’s subterranean home studio in east Detroit, nearly life-size and registering an ambiguous presence. The clay effigies are created using the coil method, traces of which remain on the surfaces of the figures…… in the case of Standing Figure II the artist applied sinuous surface marks in slip that loosely reference traditional Yoruba body painting. K.A. Letts, June 2025 

David Klein Gallery is pleased to announce the grand opening of its new gallery headquarters at 678 Livernois Street, Ferndale, Michigan. A two day opening celebration will take place on Friday, July 11 beginning at 5 PM and continuing into the evening, and on Saturday, July 12 from 12 PM to 6 PM. The opening exhibition features new work on paper by Ferndale-based artist Susan Goethel Campbell and large scale ceramic sculpture by Detroit-based artist Ebitenyefa Baralaye. The celebratory opening event on Friday evening includes a selection of wines by Elie Wine Company. Owner Elie Boudt is a Ferndale resident and gallery neighbor. Sounds provided by At the Moment (atm) and complimentary valet parking will be available. On Saturday the selection of wines by Elie Wine Company continues. There will be an artist talk and gallery walk-through with Ebitenyefa Baralaye and Susan Goethel Campbell at 1:00 PM. “This move is not just about a new space, it’s about investing in Ferndale’s future as a destination for the arts,” says gallery founder David Klein. “With restaurants, cafes, photography studios, framing shops, and a growing creative community, Livernois is becoming a premiere art corridor for metro Detroit. We are thrilled to be part of that momentum and help bring even more visibility to the area. It’s energizing and exciting.” The exhibition Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Foundations + Susan Goethel Campbell, Soundings showcases the work of two artists from distinct backgrounds, ethnicities, and artistic objectives, intersecting at a mid-point in their already-established careers. Campbell’s background in printmaking and Baralaye’s expertise in ceramics have significantly shaped their artistic journeys. However, each artist has utilized their respective crafts to cultivate a distinctive style that transcends their initial disciplines. Campbell’s newest entry into her continuing investigation of life’s natural cycles began during her recent residency on the Greek Island of Skopelos, where the heat and light-drenched environment called into being some of the artist’s most vibrant and exuberant work to date. Intense colors, like those she observed in the sea and in the brilliant bougainvillea growing against the stark white of stuccoed buildings, create an expression of pure chromatic joy. Ebitenyefe Baralay’s mixed media and ceramic artworks mark a clear contrast to Campbells’ in spirit, material and ambition. In contrast to Campbell’s lyrical reflections on nature’s evanescence, Baralaye’s solid and silent beings present as avatars of permanence. These stately human forms emerge, Lazarus-like, from Baralaye’s subterranean home studio in east Detroit, nearly life-size and registering an ambiguous presence. The clay effigies are created using the coil method, traces of which remain on the surfaces of the figures…… in the case of Standing Figure II the artist applied sinuous surface marks in slip that loosely reference traditional Yoruba body painting. K.A. Letts, June 2025