‘I like a view, but I like to sit with my back turned to it.’ Gertrude Stein 1874-1946.

The representation of the feminine personae has long been a subject of art history. The female visage has featured in various depictions in this history – obscured, averted, deformed, glorified, domesticated, dehumanised. In her latest exhibition, artist Deborah Klein builds on this artistic canon of the feminine, offering us the idea of Rückenfigur – “the figure seen from behind.

Weaving together sewing iconography derived primarily from handmade doilies inherited from her late Aunt Eileen, and motifs of knots and braids, Klein stitches together a story that is as complex as the knots that she depicts; a story of the perpetual outsider where our current state of disconnection – from ourselves, each other and the natural world – is rendered palpable.”

Deborah Klein is a Ballarat-based artist whose body of work includes paintings, drawings, prints, artist books and applied sculptures. In the forty years she has been practising, she has presented in regular solo and group exhibitions in Australia and internationally. Hidden histories and ideas related to the elusive nature of the feminine personae are central to Klein’s work.
Deborah Klein grew up in St. Kilda in Victoria. She lived and worked in London during much of the 1970s.

Since 1987 she has held regular solo exhibitions and has been included in numerous curated exhibitions in Australia and overseas.