Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

“To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumor kept her imagination awake.” – Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is pleased to open its fall season on September 5, 2025 with a group show of five artists whose work engages the physical and emotional impressions left by moments, events, or places. Working in mediums both traditional and experimental, each artist points to the past as something to be carried forward through visual and tactile means.

A consonant is defined by an impediment – a partial or complete obstruction of the airflow in the vocal tract. It is the antithesis of the directness expressed by a vowel – a sound produced with an open vocal tract, allowing air to flow freely. Ironically, the free flow of air alone does not produce a full spectrum of desired meanings. It is its inhibition that completes human spoken language. Arguably, all paintings are translations; imagery is predetermined in the painter’s mind before it is realized on canvas. True to both traditions of representation and abstraction, this process of cartography is never one hundred percent accurate. The artist’s style is revealed by the methods of translation between the “imagery in mind” and the “imagery realized.” Some are “vowel” painters who keep their mouths open and resist the blockage of the flow. Contrarily, “consonant” painters only partially disclose their original plans and recruit materials lost in translation to complete their final arguments. Using actual Hangul (Korean) consonants as her motif, Jenny Jisun Kim’s Verses on Oxherding paintings weave together a fable of translation and painting under the guise of linguistic gibberish. A seasoned translator between Korean and English literature and poetry, the artist is well aware of the inconclusiveness of most translation works in a linguistic setting. In this new series of works, Kim continues to explore these limitations via yet another translation-painting. Her choice of Hangul consonants, which are modeled after the shapes our mouths make, is thoughtful and unapologetic; their silence is to be pronounced by the brushstrokes and heard by the eyes. She pairs these angulated semiotics with Oxherding pictures under the Zen Buddhist tradition. The original Buddhist Oxherding pictures are a sequence of ten illustrations accompanied by poems and commentaries that depict the path to enlightenment through the metaphor of taming an ox. Each stage, from the protagonist searching for the ox to his returning to the world with open hands, visualizes a distinct phase of spiritual development. Kim’s Verses on Oxherding reimagines this sequence across fourteen paintings, with one retained constant: a circle that overlays each painting and its background. Ironically, the only Hangul consonant that isn’t angular, “ㅇ,” resembles a perfect circle, which is also the ultimate symbol in Zen Buddhism. Just like her paintings, when Kim speaks English, she carries the slightest accent. For those who know the language, they might identify it as Korean, but approaching her from her art, it is an accent that demonstrates a humbleness in admitting the limitation of languages and their signs, a trigger of subjective imperfection and an invitation to open our mouths and join the conversation even if what is spoken is a gibberish consisting of only consonants. Wittgenstein once hushed us with the shortest chapter of writing in the history of philosophy, which reads “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” After this line, blank pages were intentionally left. Kim’s Verses on Oxherding series wittily responds to the language philosopher by filling in these blank pages. Speaking with painting might reach the same conclusion, the only difference lies in the fact that she had actually spoken. -Phil Zheng Cai

Klaus Gallery is pleased to present Bodysnatchers, a group show featuring works by Karsen Heagle, Jenny Jisun Kim, Levani, Mónica Palma, and Robin Peck. The 1955 Book “The Bodysnatchers” by Jack Finney, and its successive film adaptation(s), “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers” are often interpreted allegorically to reflect the anxieties of the Cold War era. In the story, alien spores replace citizens of a small town in California with “pod-people”—emotionless, sterile doppelgangers who if left unchecked would use up all resources and turn the earth into a dead planet before moving onto the next world. The plot has been seen as representing the threat of communism, McCarthyism and the “red scares”, and paranoia about societal collapse amid the threat of nuclear war. This show extends the themes in the story to current anxieties, including the loss of institutions and the rise of authoritarianism, political “othering” or erasing, ecological devastation, and the loss of due process amongst a broader erosion of rights. Karsen Heagle’s paintings of scavengers such as vultures and hyenas tearing into animal flesh are inspired by “bestieries” from medieval manuscripts depicting fanged animals eating sinners. The inclusion of gold leafing gives the works a quasi-religious context, perhaps obliquely referring to spirituality, or structures of social subjugation. Works by Jenny Jisun Kim, Untitled (Oxherding), are inspired by a series of Zen Buddhist poems and illustrations that tell the story of a young herder who undertakes a quest towards a spiritual awakening. The journey is depicted allegorically as the taming of an ox, culminating in the transcendence of both subject and object, and represented visually by an empty circle. While the original story resolves with the oxherder returning to society as a sage, Kim’s reinterpretation lingers in the terrain of pursuit, resistance, and dissolution, referenced through compositions using circles and abstraction. Levani’s works bring together an interest in ancestral cosmologies, contemporary science, and activism with sculptural objects that can be used as flags, weapons, and ritualistic objects. The messages inscribed in English and Georgian are invocations, simultaneously political and poetic, aiming to inspire interconnectivity and empower the resistance. Two videos by Mónica Palma capture works she performed in Mexico City and New York City, respectively. Both videos, filmed with an iphone, depict the engagement of her body with portals – putting her hand in holes in the pavement in Mexico, and in the other, physically licking the dings on the mirror-like metal walls of a subway car in NYC. The works relate to personhood and presence, healing and belonging, and transgressive behaviour in public spaces. Formalist sculptures by Robin Peck suggest human heads that have been melted, weathered or eroded. The works are absurdist, minimal accumulations of matter, and the materials list indicates a successive build up of form from core to surface, i.e, lead, encased successively by iron, aluminium, steel, plaster, hydrocal, shellac, then wax.

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is pleased to present Erika Ranee’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, opening Thursday, May 29 and running through July 11, 2025. The astrological phenomenon known as a “Saturn Return” signals, to adherents, a powerful shift: when Saturn circles back to the position it occupied at the time of one’s birth, it often sparks major life changes. Happening roughly every 27 to 30 years, these periods are said to be linked to transformation and growth. Erika Ranee’s new exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery celebrates the end of her second full Saturn Return. While Ranee doesn’t strictly follow astrological traditions, she embraces the Saturn Return as a symbolic marker of time—a way to chart the evolution of her life and practice over recent years. In this new body of work, she channels the energy of this transformative cycle into vibrant, richly layered paintings. Poured, sprayed, and brushed paint collide with collaged drawings of braided hair, fingerprints, coral, and intricate labyrinths. Personal reflections, found texts, and natural objects gathered during local travels are embedded into the surfaces, pushing the abstract language of her paintings into dynamic new territory. Ranee describes these works as visual diaries, mapping her inner world as she moves through pivotal moments of change. Erika Ranee received her MFA in painting from the University of California, Berkeley and her B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She has recently participated in group shows at The Brooklyn Museum, The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, PPOW Gallery, Last Days Gallery, Bienvenu Steinberg & C, and Left Field Gallery. In 2024, Ranee had her first institutional solo exhibition at the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech as well as a solo show at the Art Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton, NY. She is a recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in Painting. She has been awarded studio grants from The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, The Abrons Art Center, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work is in the collections of The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Flint Institute of Arts in Flint, MI, and the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA.

Klaus von Nichtssagend is pleased to announce Rücken–, Kemar Keanu Wynter’s third solo exhibition opening on Friday, September 6, from 6-8pm. The exhibition delves into the profound emotional depth of Wynter’s work, revealing his sentimental approach to color field painting. The artist charts the sublime through a masterful technique that reconfigures one’s perception of space, texture, and flavor into mutable and tactile sensations, offering a full-body immersion. Wynter’s alchemical process is deeply rooted in chemistry and memory. Born to a family of Jamaican immigrants who settled in Brooklyn, New York, Wynter came of age in a household where love and strong bonds manifested through gatherings and home-cooked meals. Guided by these heartfelt reflections, Wynter developed an artistic style he dubs a “visual Patois,” a unique language through which he can triangulate himself between the Caribbean, New York, and the innumerable geographies, cultures, and cuisines he has yet encountered. Artworks become totems of Wynter’s unique perspective, marking his ability to freeze time and reinterpret his experiences of intimacy and indulgence through sensual hues and feverish gestures. Every tantalizing note he consumes, he transforms into jovial recollections. Like an esteemed gourmand, Wynter contorts, diffuses, and performs pigment to map a haptic sensibility one experiences through taste and ambiance. Rücken– is the latest result of Wynter’s ever-evolving articulation of a visual Patois. Plucked from the full term Rückenfigur, a nineteenth-century art motif popularized by German Romanticists, famously employed in Caspar David Friedrich’s seminal painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog (1818). Rückenfigur translates to “figure from the back.” It’s a ubiquitous compositional device that evokes longing and invites viewers to complete the scene by stepping into the faceless figure’s role, embracing nature’s grandeur and power. In Wynter’s Rücken–, we are not just viewers but active participants in his religious entanglements with romance through the lens of synesthesia and cartography. Each large-scale painting transcribes feelings of love, abundance, and pleasure into an angelic mirage of colors that blur into one another across pulsating surfaces. In this visual dance, Wynter compels our eyes to scan voraciously. Each scene holds ragmented notes that coalesce into one body, recording dishes and atmospheres shared with his loves arading as wafting shifts in primal, illusive, and untranslatable speech. In Knead Bee (Marionberry Cheesecake Ice Cream), 2024, lusty pastels disperse like spotty cloud formulations that foreshadow a lofty journey. Emerging from a late-night ice cream rendezvous after having seen L’Rain perform at Bowery Ballroom, the artist creates a blushing nude that dominates the canvas. Splotches of diluted oranges and mustard ochres emerge from the edges. Blending with rose tones–bursts of mint twist in this demure hue while a bioluminescent lavender curves inward from the left field. He prepares his paintings on sheets of a polyester microfiber called Evolon, laying them on the ground before he applies acrylic to the heavily wetted surface. Wynter works into the surface repeatedly until the ideal image takes form. The artist hangs each painting untamed by borders, with the back side facing us, revealing pigment that has shifted and migrated through the porous surface, resulting in weathered and wrinkled striations that fawn a darker patina. The colors we see carry a temperance to them, repositioning our gluttonous appetite into a tender modality that lingers in the folds of our skin long after the moment has passed. When viewing these conspicuous paintings, our silhouette molds into its frame, transporting our bodies into an experience the artist has carefully illustrated for us. — Shameekia Shantel Johnson, 2024

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery opens its fall season with a front-gallery show of David Scanavino’s drawings. The room will be enveloped by a grid of works on archival colored papers, each the same size. These drawings reflect Scanavino’s daily process of generating iconographic forms that border on abstraction. The wax-crayon works are made with bold colors and lines, reducing natural forms – birds, trees, flowers – into silhouettes and shapes. Scanavino’s use of crayon on construction paper evokes childhood creativity, a theme woven throughout his oeuvre over the past 15 years. This immersive installation offers a close look into Scanavino’s studio, and shows his dedication to experimental mark-making and color. The show’s focus on drawing reveals how he distills images into forms, paving the way for his larger paintings and sculptural installations. David Scanavino has created major installations in recent years at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT; the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, MO; and the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, TX. He is an associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design and lives and works in Providence, RI. This is his fifth solo show with the gallery.

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery presents a new solo exhibition of Barry Stone’s photographic work based on his ongoing web project Porch Swing Orchestra, which explores the interplay between images, music, and field recordings. The framed photographs, wall vinyls, and sound recordings included in this exhibition provide a window into the project’s history. Since 2018, Stone has published images paired with sound on porchswingorchestra.org. Each post consists of an audio field recording of Stone’s guitar melodies plus ambient sounds (conversations of passersby, the rattle of air conditioners, birdsong, sirens of cicadas) and a photograph taken at the time and place of the recording. The photographs are often “databent,” which involves hacking the code that makes up digital images to glitch the picture. In the gallery space, large databent images have been printed as vinyls and adhered directly to the wall, providing a layered backdrop for nine framed works. Sounds collaged from the original recordings play on speakers in the gallery. During the show, a special edition, 12-inch LP of the original PSO sound pieces will be available at the gallery. In addition, the gallery will make a weekly post of new PSO pieces on the website.

Holly Coulis’s upcoming solo show at Klaus Gallery, titled Rubber Band, will feature glowing new explorations of color and line, two areas in which Coulis has fiercely pushed her work over the past 20 years. This show, her fifth with the gallery, will open May 17, 2024 and will run through June 21. Outlines serve as unreliable guides in Coulis’s new work. Here, long, colorfully painted strokes adopt a cursive quality, departing from the still life representations they have previously delineated. Squiggles and loops press against each other, moving mischievously through broader fields of layered chromatic brushstrokes. At times, these lines rush like rivulets across the canvas, while elsewhere they form an array of dynamically curving shapes within confined areas. The lines prove unpredictable, veering around hairpin curves and playfully wobbling after crafting graceful arcs. Following their trajectory leads us on detours that challenge our initial perceptions. Glimpses of familiar silhouettes—vases, bowls, fruits—vanish as swiftly as they materialize, as if the line refuses to complete the thought, instead eagerly moving on to the next loop, curl, or helix. Holly Coulis (b. 1968, Toronto, Ontario) lives and works in Athens, Georgia. She holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America, Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic among others. The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Kansas include Coulis’s work in their permanent collections.