60 WRD/MIN ART CRITIC @ PROJECT SPACE KANSAS CITY, MO 4/16/10 4:35PM

AMY KLIGMAN

The paintings of Amy Kligman are deceptively pretty and sweet. Gentle, lithe girls are often their subject, as are girlish delights like kittens, balloons, bunnies and rainbows. But though Kligman’s pictures are often covered in flowers and other flora, everything is not here coming up roses. Look beyond the pastel colors and soft furry creatures—there lurks a subtle world of anxiety and shame and shyness. It’s in the blooms that cover the face and

torso of the cutie in “Girl Disappearing,” marks that are as much sores as flowers. Note her sad, red-rimmed eyes. Notice too that she has no nose, no mouth, and as such cannot fully communicate, even if she had the will to do so. A similar muteness affects the kind waif in “Please, Thank You, and You’re Welcome,” but here the blossoms, except for one that muffles her mouth, fill the background, making a wall of flowers and her a wallflower, the kind of girl who can’t manage to say much other than the words of her own title. What’s wrong with these sweet young things? It could be anything—the weight of the world is often placed on girls’ shoulders, as an entire commercial and spectacular economy has developed that revolves around girls as objects of desire and desiring objects. How to survive in the face of such pressures often means “going underground,” as sociologists have termed it, burying oneself in the face of puberty until it’s safe to come back up above ground. If it ever really is. —Lori Waxman

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"Lagoon" By Misha Kligman, gesso and

graphite on paper.

Free Times - Ohio's Premier News, Arts, &Entertainment Weekly

Arts

Volume 15, Issue 22

Published October 3rd, 2007

Arts Lead

Winter Gardens

Amy And Misha Kligman At Wooltex Gallery

By Douglas Max Utter

Every surface chips, cracks or peels. Bark is scattered on the

ground. The red decay of autumn bleeds slowly through the

dusty greens of late summer. We ourselves are painted in a

wash of molecules dissolving on a loosely woven fabric of

DNA, while the ghosts of old selves chatter in the background

of our brief, ever-changing lives.

Amy and Misha Kligman's current show at Wooltex Gallery is

called Pentimenti, which is an art historical term referring to

the way that earlier drafts of paintings, figures and

compositional elements that the artist painted over

sometimes become visible again. Upper layers can develop a strange transparency due to age

and other factors, and the result is a slightly uncanny vision of process and roads not taken. The

two Kligmans have very different takes on this metaphor, but both deal with the fickleness of

reality and the transience of surfaces.

Among the pleasures of Pentimenti is the artistic growth both painters demonstrate. Amy

Kligman, who formerly painted under the name of Amathin, has had a day job as an illustrator for

several greeting card companies over the years, both in Cleveland and in Kansas City where the

couple now lives. She's long used that experience to good effect, creating a layered, wallpaper-

like world where shreds and snippets of popular children's design culture - duckies, bunnies, wide-

eyed kids with big blond heads - survive only in a much-damaged state. Maybe it's childhood

itself that is half-obscured in this way by the corrosive rains of time and experience, or it could

be that Amathin's subject is rather the residue of lies told about children and how it distorts our

vision of ourselves. A sense of lost innocence, regret, and a hint that, despite everything, there

are still secret gardens nourishing the spirit are the hallmarks of her earlier work.

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"A Secret" By Amy Kligman, 2007.

are still secret gardens nourishing the spirit are the hallmarks of her earlier work.

These remain among her subjects, but Amy Kligman's

paintings at Wooltex are emotionally darker in tone and more

certain in their vision. Many of them explore interpersonal

moods and states, the mysteries of unspoken communication,

using elaborately unfurling speech balloons full of patterns or

flowers and colors - breath and unspoken inside words that

float between, say, two children.

"A Secret" (2007), for instance, shows a boy and a girl in

vaguely Victorian garb. He wears blue shorts and lace-up

leather boots, she is dressed in a plain yellow smock with

white trim. Behind them a small wood stands on five pale

tree trunks like a plump five-legged animal while in the gray

and white tangle of detail up in the belly of the branches, a

very big yellow bird's head sings a long teardrop

embroidered with blue leaves. The girl grasps the boy by his

arm and whispers a short, pale message, flowing in a shallow

double curve from her mouth to his ear. It may be poison

that she pours in his ear, or it just might be a word that will

change his life. The ambiguity is even more pronounced in

"Little Scream," which shows a group of small boys in rabbit costumes loitering near a slightly

older girl in a stiff tulle skirt and tiny black maryjanes. From her mouth issues a decorative yellow

plume of flowers, as if collaged on the air. The boys are perhaps slightly demonic with their

peculiar glasses and whiskers; the girl may show some signs of anxiety. But it's mainly the title

that casts doubt on this idyllic scene. All signs of inner chaos are so well-hidden in this enchanted

land that even a scream appears as a swath of wallpaper.

Misha Kligman graduated from Cleveland State University in 2001 and is currently pursuing a

graduate degree in the arts at the University of Kansas. He has been known over the past several

years for smaller scale, highly detailed realist self-portraits, among other subjects. Some of these

have actually been painted on top of photographs, but the current examples are all paint. The

exceptional quality of these works derives less from their detail and accuracy than from the

intensity they project. The selfhood that Kligman depicts is one that deliberately evades head-on

exposure, and the power of the portraits is based on a tension rising between the frankness of

the artist's self-scrutiny and what at first seems like a willful desire to hide from the viewer. One

painting shows him in profile, while in another, his eyes are closed, seated next to a man in

shadow. Here Kligman's face is upturned and his eyes are shut against strong sunlight, while his

companion, who gazes at him, is wrapped in shadow; on close examination we realize this second

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companion, who gazes at him, is wrapped in shadow; on close examination we realize this second

man is also Kligman. In a third work the artist looks straight at the viewer, but his eyes seem

unfocused or very tired. He is hunkered sideways in a small barrel-backed chair, wearing a red

and white plaid cowboy shirt. The room, like his eyes, is faded and empty, with a scuffed and

scumbled floor and a line on the right where two bare walls form an angle. In spirit it's a little like

one of Giacometti's famous self-portrait drawings, where the true subject is the space that the

figure occupies and the strangeness of one's own physical insertion into the world, into sensation

and thought and experience. That in the end is the situation that all of Kligman's paintings

attempt to reenact as he seeks not to hide, but to surprise himself from an accidental

perspective, revealing unsuspected intersections of mind and feeling, place and soul.

In keeping with this search, Kligman's "Lagoon" is a surrealist landscape, which like many

landscape paintings is also a metaphoric vision of the interior of the body as it spreads darkly

before the introspective self. A glass-like curlicue-shaped hybrid of dust devil and alchemical

filtration device churns toward us across uneven, desolate sands, casting its twisted shadow near

a circular depression, like a mark on the surface of the moon. A low line of barren mountains is

smudged across the horizon. Slanting in on the right side of this gesso-and-graphite-on-paper

work, a drive-in movie screen or a billboard displays a nude man and woman. Their magnified

and elongated bodies stretch over and under each other like earth and sky. Like everything here

by both Kligmans, the vision is of a present moment stretched so tightly over deception or doubt

that reality begins to wear away.

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