Jos de Kleijn

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jozef Alexander Maria de Kleijn (born June 23, 1947 in Grave , Netherlands ) is a visual artist living in Göhl , Ostholstein .

Career

After completing his apprenticeship as a carpenter and acquiring a technical qualification , Jos de Kleijn studied fine art from 1969 to 1971 at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and from 1977 to 1983 at the Muthesius Academy of Art in Kiel . He has been working as a freelancer since 1983. Among other things, he exhibited several times together with Klaus Rilling and Jörg Plickat , with whom he briefly ran the artist group “Der M” in the 1980s. He is a member of the Federal Association of Visual Artists , the Lübeck Artists' Association and the Neustadt in Holstein Art Association.

plant

The extensive oeuvre de Kleijns different drawing techniques are used, the drawing with lead and color pencil , charcoal , chalk and graphite dominates his work, but also the painting with oil paint makes a big share of.

His early work includes various illustrations, for example “Alois the Lion” from Gustav Meyrinck's Des Deutschen Spießers Wunderhorn or Edgar Allan Poe's King Pest . His work often has a narrative level.

Jos de Kleijn's work is subjectively shaped throughout and is based on everyday reflections and autobiographical experiences of the artist.

Jos de Kleijn's series Mercy You - Pictures for an Aria , first exhibited in 1991 , has a very personal connection to Johann Sebastian Bach's aria Mercy from the St. Matthew Passion . The works, which include the triptych Mercy - Love, Alone, Death and ten expressive charcoal and chalk portraits The Mourners , contain motifs of love, loneliness, birth and life, death and mourning, passion and violence. For the artist, who sees himself as a non-theist in the sense of Erich Fromm , mercy has no direct religious reference here, in which God is asked for mercy, but rather people, life, being. Quote from the artist: "I am moved by the realization of our fate, that we are a part of the whole, that nothing is just black or white, good or bad and that opposites are dependent."

The processing of personal experiences and emotions as well as the topic of people and their relationships run like a red thread through Jos de Kleijn's artistic exploration. He accepts that these topics can also trigger unpleasant emotions in the recipient. He himself says that it is important to him to “make his viewers affected” - this concern can have both negative and positive connotations.

An important motif in Jos de Kleijn's work is the representation of imaginary landscapes, which often function like a stage for a painted or drawn human world theater. The best example would be various pictures with the title Summit , which have been created using different techniques (including colored pencil drawings on paper, oil on canvas) since the 1990s. However, the landscape as a stage for humans already appeared in de Kleijn's early work.

Jos de Kleijn began teaching as an adult education center back in the 80s and is now successfully running his private art school in his studio in Göhl with various courses in which he teaches different painting and drawing techniques.

Exhibitions (selection)

Further exhibitions a. a. in Altena (Sauerland) , Bonn , Münster , Neumünster , Rastede , Rendsburg .

Publicly owned work

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Lübecker Nachrichten, November 14, 1991
  2. ^ Exhibition website Jos de Kleijn
personal data
SURNAME Kleijn, Jos de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Kleijn, Jozef Alexander Maria de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch visual artist
DATE OF BIRTH June 23, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Grave , Netherlands