Rae Klein doesn’t have the typical trajectory of a gallery-system artist. Raised in a small Michigan town with no real artistic community, she started sharing her work online, and before she’d even settled on painting she had thought about becoming a nurse. Only in her third year of college did she move toward painting, graduating from Eastern Michigan University in 2017. She never went through graduate school, nor did she move to New York as the classic career path would dictate. In 2022, Art News described her as a painter without the typical markers of the art world, but with a large Instagram following, an audience built well before any gallery, one that has effectively replaced an MFA. Klein has stayed in Michigan by choice, preferring to work in her studio all day, alone, with no need for a big city to sustain her practice.
A vocabulary made of found objects
Rae Klein’s painting draws on an archive of objects salvaged from eBay, thrift stores, antique shops and online auctions. The subjects she depicts, candelabras, dogs, windows, fountains or castles, aren’t chosen to be faithfully reproduced, but become the elements of a personal lexicon, images the artist combines as if they were words in search of ever-new meanings. Klein herself describes this process as a continuous scrolling through a visual vocabulary, waiting for the right combination to emerge.
Her working method, too, swings between control and spontaneity. After her formative years, marked by small, extremely meticulous paintings, her practice opened up to a freer, more textural style of painting, always done in oil on linen. Color follows an equally intuitive logic: earthy tones are reserved for figures, animals and candles, while architectural or mechanical elements are handled with different palettes. Alongside the more studied works are paintings born of impulse, made without preparation, a necessary counterpoint to the more rigorously planned pieces.
Doubled faces, suspended animals, the surface as subject
The conceptual core of Klein’s work is the staging itself, not whatever it might seem to conceal. Her art “spectralizes”: decorative objects, real and imagined animals, the human face become conceptual devices able to hold presence and absence together within the same image. Faces, when they appear, are almost always obscured, while flowers and shells are placed into the composition like true portals. It’s no accident that the theme of the double keeps recurring: in a 2024 work, as the artist recounts, a dog repeated three times over itself later turned, in the following painting, into a woman’s face doubled into something more unsettling, a malevolent doppelgänger hidden behind her own image. Dogs, horses and sphinxes often float in monochrome skies, detached from any context, a suspension that, as the gallery itself notes, calls into question the line between domestication and instinct, between what we believe we control and what has simply adapted to stay close to us.
