Specializing in Thai & Asian Contemporary Art

Between Intimacy and Estrangement

H Gallery is very pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Will Klose, his fourth at the gallery. British-born Klose has been based in Thailand for over a decade and currently works out of a studio on the edge of the city of Chiang Mai. The artist’s practice of meticulously painted scenes carefully shifts around a core preoccupation with subtle conflicts between intimacy and estrangement. Spaces of domesticity are rendered in view of urban density and creeping psychological dramas are evoked by both the presence and sense of absence of human figures. He employs sharp contrasts of light and a palette that demands close consideration of its gradated diversity.

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 held an 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.

Between Intimacy and Estrangement essentially distills Klose’s concerns as a painter to date. He 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 previously unnoted potentials. Here, 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-emphasized, her back is turned in one work and moved towards the edge in others. A greater sense of the happenstance is also introduced, away from art-historical mediation or the artfully composed.

For the first time Klose includes self-portraits, including a portrait of a portrait that reflects on his very medium and method.

Between Intimacy and Estrangement indeed intensifies the interests of Klose’s practice. His views of windows, doors, corridors, disarrayed objects and shadowed figures capture us in slowly monumentalized moments of ambiguity. The obsessive surfaces and angular architecture reflect anxieties of looking on and looking out while the sharp, sudden shafts of light sometimes ameliorate.

Will Klose is based between Thailand and the UK and is a graduate of Edinburgh College of Art and Camberwell College of Arts. His exhibitions include Catto Contemporary (2003-04), London; Twist Gallery (2004-05), London; and Francis Iles Gallery (2006-07) in Kent, UK. His exhibitions at H Gallery include The Construct of Chance (2011); Witthayu (2012); and Disquiet (2015). Witthayu was also mounted at the Four Seasons Hotel in Bangkok and Disquiet at G1 Contemporary in Bangkok.

 

New Paintings by Will Klose
October 19 – November 26, 2017