Barbara Klein

Biography

Barbara Klein received her MFA from the Pratt Institute in 1983 and her BA from the College of New Jersey (formerly Trenton State College) in 1981.  She has received grants, awards and fellowships from the NJ State Council on the Arts - twice, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation - twice, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper making, Millay Colony for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony and the Edward F. Albee Foundation, among others.
 
Klein has exhibited at: the New Jersey State Museum, multiple times; the Allentown Art Museum,PA; Jersey City Museum, NJ; Bristol-Myers Squibb Gallery, Princeton, NJ; the Noyes Museum, NJ; Woodmere Art Museum, PA; Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA; Gary Snyder Fine Art, NYC and Accola Contemporary, NYC, among many others.

Her work - generally painted on paper, canvas, or wood - is striking for its unusual textures and colored patterns.  However, these bold abstractions are composed neither spontaneously nor quickly. She writes, “I juggle the position and placement of the components, until the right balance of color, weight, texture, and symbolic references has been achieved… My surfaces are compulsively worked and revised, sanded, scraped, again and again until each piece has the right kind of visual history. This can take months, sometimes years, to accomplish.”