27-year-old painter Ray Klein doesn’t have the typical art world clues: she never went to high school or moved to New York (or any other big city for that matter). She has one thing the art world craves these days: over 99,000 followers on Instagram.
Now, she has given a solo show at the Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco.
“She’s not even from Detroit, she’s from Holland, Michigan, which is a small town,” said Jessica Silverman. ARTnews. “It was really strange to me how I was able to interact with audiences in such a broad way from a city that didn’t have a large art community.”
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But Klein’s lack of a cohesive arts community is exactly why she invests so much in her online presence.
When Klein was young, she loved to draw, but did not make anything of it. The idea of living as a working artist was a dream without a roadmap. Her father was a heavy equipment operator in Holland, a small town on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, who would shovel snow off roads in tough Midwest winters. Her mother is an administrative assistant at a company that manufactures test rooms. When Klein graduated from high school, she decided to study nursing at Eastern Michigan University, even when she felt it wouldn’t work.
“I was doing Nursing 101 and looking at all these people, and I was thinking, ‘These guys are going to be really good at this.’ And I started to feel like maybe I’m not,” Klein said. ARTnews The day before the opening of her exhibition in Silverman entitled “Comfort in Disaster”.
Right after college, I started working as a dining illustrator on campus, which included tasks such as drawing a school mascot eating grilled cheese. The experience opened her eyes to the idea that art could be a legitimate career path, so she enrolled in an art class.
“That was my first experience with drawing and it was a heavy weight on my shoulder, well, maybe that’s a real thing,” Klein said.
Once Klein graduated in 2017, she began treating her graphics like a second job after shifts at a box-making factory and, eventually, from her job at what she described as a “tourist town fair.”
“It was fine there,” she said, “and I have a lot of experience with like how to act.” Continuing her experience, she taught her how to measure and price artwork, the expectations of an exhibition setting, and how relationships work between artists, curators, artists, and collectors. She was thinking about the idea of going to graduate school when she started promoting her work on Instagram.
“I kind of realized that all the people I want to call, that’s kind of where they are,” she said.
Even in the photo-saturated world of Instagram, Klein’s work stands out. Her paintings feature recurring, electrically charged motifs: shells with oceans, candlesticks floating in an empty space, two-headed geese, gemstones sparkling irresistibly from an open palm, or a dog’s mouth lit from the inside. Distant, lush, blue landscapes – the kinds you see in the backgrounds of Renaissance paintings – are painted on the blank face of the Sphinx or haunted by their images of translucent targets. The constellation of objects and landscapes that bring them together are like enchanting five-pointed star points, transporting audiences to a parallel mythical world.
Klein found enthusiastic followers on the Internet, as a result of which the number of her followers swelled. She began selling her work for about $100 to whoever sent it first for a particular piece. As interest increased, I began curating drops of paintings and prints. Her career, until recently, was DIY: she marketed herself, learned how to ship artwork, and calmed and vetted naughty buyers. In the end, she was earning enough to make painting her full time job.
As the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to spend more time on their phones, Klein gained more shares and galleries. In the Valley, a gallery in Taos, New Mexico. Shows in London, Antwerp and Amsterdam followed, as well as in Los Angeles, with the Nicodim Gallery, which now represents her.
“I didn’t go to grad school, really, and I don’t really have connections with people in the art world, it’s like my feet are a little bit off the pond floor,” Klein said. “Owning an acting is a whole new world to me, I used to do everything myself.”
Klein no longer sells work on Instagram or on her website.
All along, the artist has been on Silverman’s radar for quite some time.
“I rarely look at work online, but a friend tagged me in a post about Ray’s gallery in Taos,” Silverman said. “I found the work strange.”
Silverman took a deep dive on Instagram and Klein’s website, and noted that they were Michiganders. Silverman DMed Klein expressed an interest in her work, and the next time Silverman visited her family in Michigan, she made the time to meet Klein in person. “It just turned out to be how excited I was to work with her,” Silverman said.
While working on “The Comfort in Calamity,” Klein was also preparing for her Nicodim show, “YOU ME ME YOU,” and Silverman was concerned that Klein might have overexerted herself.
“I was like, ‘Are you going to be okay?’ She said not to worry, she had two completely different offers on her mind,” Silverman said. “She’s so young but she already has so many different businesses, it’s impressive.”
The works on display at Jessica Silverman feature a new series of Klein-drawn canvases of curtains—photos of which she got from old Sears catalogs—flanked in stark red. The curtains and views they reveal are typical of Klein style, yet there is something a little less dreamy and more modern about these pieces.
“I am very interested in strength, the moments when you might feel strong or powerless and the moments when that changes,” Klein said. “Now, I am trying to say a little more. Can I say one thing? Could this curtain have as much strength as my previous work?”
It’s clear that Klein is at a turning point in her career. She has moved to a new studio in Michigan and is looking forward to working on her new series, but things could change even more. Silverman noted that while someone like Klein doesn’t need an MFA, moving to a larger city might be a step she should take, even if she’s more a collector.
But Klein is not worried. For now, she’s just happy that she can paint big paintings and won’t have to worry about how to ship them.
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