Michael Klein returned from Maxwell Alexander Gallery’s 10th Anniversary exhibition in October of 2022 with a renewed sense of excitement and enthusiasm to pour into his work.
“I was really inspired by everything they’ve done in the amount of time they’ve been in business,” says Klein, who has been with the gallery for nearly as long, and has a deep respect for owner Beau Alexander and his brother, artist Logan Maxwell Hagege. “They started out as a gallery with a vision to support the artists. Typically people go into business to make money but Beau really had a vision that they’ve stayed true to.”
Almighty, oil, 11 x 12”
While Maxwell Alexander is often associated with contemporary Western art, like that of Hagege’s work, they also represent artists working in the broader genre of contemporary realism like Klein, who is best-known for his classically rendered florals and landscapes.
For nearly a decade, Klein longed to return to figurative art which was his focus early in his career before his still lifes proved to be in highest demand. In recent years, he began introducing quiet equine scenes of wild horses on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
“I’ve been eyeing the genre from a distance for eight years,” says Klein, whose new body of work is an even further departure of what he has produced thus far—high-action steer wrestling scenes that will be the subject of an upcoming exhibition at Maxwell Alexander Gallery titled Western Impulse.
He started the steer-wrestling series two years ago but kept his exploration of the new subject matter secret. When he got the nerve to share it with Scott Burdick, a similarly academy-trained contemporary realist, Burdick thought it was great and suggested he should show it to Alexander.
In the Dust, oil, 22 x 27”
“Beau has a particular vision—if someone is doing your stereotypical Western work, they aren’t going to represent it,” says Klein. “This genre—steer wrestling—has never been done or depicted in the fine art world…it fits with the gallery’s tagline of ‘a new breed of fine art.’”
Alexander encouraged him to continue with the series and the two kept close contact during the painting process to ensure Klein was on the right track, and the pieces met the gallery’s impeccable standards.
“There was a lot I was thinking about when thinking about creating this body of work,” says Klein. “Going back to figurative art was important to me and also to connect with something thematic that would resonate not only with what I want to do artistically, but with an audience that would enjoy it.”
No Way Out, oil, 22 x 27”
Unlike his still lifes, landscapes and earlier figurative works, the rodeo scenes are alive with energy, strain and action, which challenged and excited Klein, while pushing him out of his comfort zone. “That’s what drew me to the subject,” he says. “The gestures and the energy that is involved in it. The person and the steer are intertwined in such dramatic movement. It’s really fascinating—there are all these big masses of anatomy and angles, and how they connect and the many possibilities they present. It’s really difficult and that’s what makes it interesting.”
Klein grew up in North Dakota where rodeo was part of the local culture. Although his main resource for reference material is slow motion video, the end result doesn’t look anything like the footage he watches. He might change the time of day, the angle of the light source or paint the figures into a completely environment.
Take Down, oil, 12 x 16”
“Whether you’re painting landscapes or portraits, you’re constantly taking reality and turning it into an art form," says Klein. “That’s the job of the artist. Once you know how it operates, once you learn the language you can do whatever you want with it—that’s where the poetry happens. To be able to really get the emotional impact you have to say something beyond the image.
“The copyist, someone who is relying entirely on the information in front of them, is at the whim of what is being dictated to them, while the master artist can take the information provided and use it to tell the story that they want to say, rather than be at the mercy of exactly what is before them,” Klein says. “It’s a combination of my vision and the information that’s in nature.” —
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