BIOGRAPHY

Joanne Klein was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1954. She studied philosophy and literature as an undergraduate at Columbia University in New York. She received her MA in Art from New York University in 1984 after studying at the New York Studio School and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture where she was a scholarship recipient.

Klein began painting after university, her work evolving over a twenty year period from realistic renderings to surrealist landscapes and finally to the current abstract compositions. She works in oil on canvas and oil pastel on paper.

Klein’s paintings are composites of geometric shapes filled with highly saturated color. Deconstruction, reduction and rebuilding is a primary means of developing her imagery. The art historical movements of Russian constructivism, abstract expressionism and minimalism among others inform her work, as does a strong interest in contemporary architecture.

Klein moved with her family to the Hudson Valley in 1995 after many years in New York City. She lives in an historic Quaker Meeting House built in 1890 in the rural hamlet of Clinton Corners, New York.