About Jenny Klein

Jenny Klein is an artist and writer living and working between London and Southern Italy. She gained her MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Her practice centres on themes of time and memory, location and surface, and the encounter between the artist and the viewer at the shifting skin of the artwork. She works with a range of media including photography, assemblage and stitch. Her work has been exhibited widely across the UK with shows at Saatchi Gallery, Crypt Gallery, Tate Modern and Harrow Arts Centre.

Klein works with a range of materials and techniques including photography, stitch, painting and sculpture, to explore the ways in which surfaces and objects become repositories for experience and memory. She combines materials and processes to create new textures and associations. Her practice also considers the possibilities and limits of language, what can be spoken and what must be shown.

Klein’s recent work explores the body as a location and skin as a surface that conceals and reveals.  Across single images and series, photographs of her body, simple objects, stitches and text are combined to produce shapes and forms that are ambiguous and often absurd. Photographs are cropped and enlarged to emphasise abstraction, geometry and texture, while maintaining the close, at times intimate, relationship to the body, with its marks and scars. In some images the surface of the photograph is stitched into, in others the skin is enhanced or interrupted by, for example, pressure or tape, before the picture is taken. Stitch and piercing are both an alternative form of drawing and a way to consider the limits of surface.  These are gendered techniques, reflecting the artist’s longstanding interest in feminist discourse – thread as a feminine material.  Stitches also represent the element of time and touch built into each piece, through the careful process of hand stitching.  Each stitch becomes a unit of time, small in itself but expanding as part of a whole under the artist’s hand.