Join us at Themes+Projects for the opening night of Life Forms by Klari Reis.

Artist Statement

Life Forms are the latest in Klari Reis’ ever-changing artistic exploration of the systems of biology and of the beauty and design displayed in nature. Her engagement with these systems has taken her from the microscopic workings of cells, as far afield as the uncanny re-envisioning of city maps as biological blueprints, to these newest, macro paintings of nature triumphant, imposing its own order on the world.

A unifying theme of Klari’s art is her mastery of a new-media plastic, epoxy resin, and the fine control she brings to its reactions using a constantly expanding variety of dyes and pigments. The UV-resistant epoxy supplies a common framework for the methods and language that she uses to explore and express interactions of material and color on a microscopic level. Compositions display brightly colored smears, bumps, stains, and blobs atop petri dishes, aluminum, wood panels and paper. She pigments the plastic with powders, oils, acrylics, and industrial dyes, built up through many layers of the ultra-glossy plastic. A skilled technician with a studio for a laboratory, Klari has turned these processes of her own invention into science in the service of her art.

Klari Reis lives and works in San Francisco. Her art has been widely exhibited internationally, and is included in the collections of Stanford University, Google, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Merck Pharmaceuticals, Microsoft, Genentech, and The Gates Foundation.

Open to the public; on view from May 7 to July 9, 2022