Hedy Klineman is a German-born American painter living in New York City. She has been painting for over 40 years and is known for portraits of New York celebrities and colorful works based on Asian Buddha’s and deities created with silkscreen on canvas done in a manner influenced by her friend

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationsh ...

. Her paintings have been shown at

Tibet House US Tibet House US (THUS) is a Tibetan cultural preservation and education 501(c)(3) nonprofit founded in 1987 in New York City by a group of Westerners after the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, expressed his wish to establish a cultural insti ...

, Patterson Museum of Contemporary Art and The New England Museum of Contemporary Art.

Early life

Hedy Klineman grew up in Williamsburg Brooklyn. After attending F.I.T and

Pratt Institute Pratt Institute is a private university with its main campus in Brooklyn, New York (state), New York. It has a satellite campus in Manhattan and an extension campus in Utica, New York at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. The school was ...

, she graduated from

Cooper Union The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (Cooper Union) is a private college at Cooper Square in New York City. Peter Cooper founded the institution in 1859 after learning about the government-supported École Polytechnique in ...

in 1962 where she came under the influence of the Abstract Expressionists such as

Willem de Kooning Willem de Kooning (; ; April 24, 1904 – March 19, 1997) was a Dutch-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Rotterdam and moved to the United States in 1926, becoming an American citizen in 1962. In 1943, he married painter El ...

and

Franz Kline Franz Kline (May 23, 1910 – May 13, 1962) was an American painter. He is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Kline, along with other action painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Mothe ...

. After working for Charles Jourdan shoes and creating their American division, she focused on painting in the 1970s.

Art

During the 1970s, Hedy Klineman painted brushy abstractions and splashy Color Field drip paintings influenced by

Hans Hofmann Hans Hofmann (March 21, 1880 – February 17, 1966) was a German-born American painter, renowned as both an artist and teacher. His career spanned two generations and two continents, and is considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstrac ...

Helen Frankenthaler Helen Frankenthaler (December 12, 1928 – December 27, 2011) was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. Having exhibited her work for over six decades (early 1950s u ...

and

Larry Poons Lawrence M. "Larry" Poons (born October 1, 1937) is an American abstract painter. Poons was born in Tokyo, Japan, and studied from 1955 to 1957 at the New England Conservatory of Music, with the intent of becoming a professional musician. After ...

1980s

Klineman developed, in the early 1980s, a very personal style of portraiture called “Fashion Portraits.” She became known as a chronicler of the downtown art scene and of uptown socialite personalities, using an unusual collage-assemblage technique. Sitters were asked to contribute pieces of clothing that represented them. Then Klineman would adhere the clothing to the canvas along with painted elements and objects to create a mixed media portrait.

donated a pair of glasses,

Henry Geldzahler Henry Geldzahler (July 9, 1935 – August 16, 1994) was a Belgian-born American curator of contemporary art in the late 20th century, as well as a historian and critic of modern art. He is best known for his work at the Metropolitan Museum ...

gave her a hat and

Julian Schnabel Julian Schnabel (born October 26, 1951) is an American painter and filmmaker. In the 1980s, he received international attention for his "plate paintings" — with broken ceramic plates set onto large-scale paintings. Since the 1990s, he has been ...

gave her the clothes he painted in.

Keith Haring Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". Much of his wor ...

Mary McFadden Mary McFaddenCharlotte Curtis, "Mary McFadden Married to Philip Harari at St. Bartholomew's; Former Dior Aide is Wed to Director in De Beers Group", The New York Times, 26 September 1964 (born October 1, 1938) is an American art collector, editor ...

Bret Easton Ellis Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964) is an American author, screenwriter, short-story writer, and director. Ellis was first regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack and is a self-proclaimed satirist whose trademark technique, as a w ...

Larry Rivers Larry Rivers (born Yitzroch Loiza Grossberg) (1923 – 2002) was an American artist, musician, filmmaker, and occasional actor. Considered by many scholars to be the "Godfather" and "Grandfather" of Pop art, he was one of the first artists ...

Betsey Johnson Betsey Johnson (born 1942) is an American fashion designer best known for her feminine and whimsical designs. Many of her designs are considered "over the top" and embellished. She also is known for doing a cartwheel ending in a split at the ...

and

Jane Holzer Jane Holzer (née Brukenfeld; born October 23, 1940) is an American art collector and film producer who was previously an actress, model, and Warhol superstar. She was often known by the nickname Baby Jane Holzer. Biography The daughter of real ...

all donated items that were used in their portraits. These were shown at Harm Bouckaert Gallery in 1984 and Sensory Evolution Gallery in 1986. During this period, she also painted day glow nudes and figures. Latter in the 1980s as the Cold War ended, she turned to political content using silkscreened newspaper images of current events. These were shown at Rempire Gallery in Soho in 1991 along with some of the first Buddhas.

1990s

In the 1990s Klineman embarked on a spiritual journey studying meditation and yoga. She then began using deities from India, China and Indonesia. Using multiple silk-screens, Klineman overlapped Hindu and Buddhist imagery over textured backgrounds that sometimes included gold leaf. A major show of this work was held at Bridgewater Lustberg Gallery in 1996.

2000s

Hedy Klineman Bedroom Buddha 4 panel Silkscreen Acrylic on Canvas 72in x 56in 2010 1

Through the 2000s Klineman focused on the Buddha as subject matter and produced series of large multi paneled silkscreen paintings where the Buddha is repeated in bright Pop colors called “Buddha’s in the Garden.” Concurrently she continued to make hand painted Buddha’s, still lives, landscapes and abstracts.

Currently

Recently Klineman has continued portrait painting with a series called “African American Portraits” depicting prominent African Americans using African masks in silkscreen collage. Some of her subjects are

Russell Simmons Russell Wendell Simmons (born October 4, 1957) is an American entrepreneur, writer and record executive. He co-founded the hip-hop label Def Jam Recordings, and created the clothing fashion lines Phat Farm, Argyleculture, and Tantris. Simmons' ...

Mary Schmidt Campbell Mary Schmidt Campbell (born October 21, 1947), is an American academic administrator and museum curator. She began her tenure as the 10th president of Spelman College on August 1, 2015. Prior to this position, Schmidt Campbell held several positi ...

and

Jessye Norman Jessye Mae Norman (September 15, 1945 – September 30, 2019) was an American opera singer and recitalist. She was able to perform dramatic soprano roles, but refused to be limited to that voice type. A commanding presence on operatic, concert ...

. Paintings from this series were exhibited at Benrimon Contemporary in 2012. In 2013, Tibet House US presented "Buddhas in the Garden," an exhibit of Klineman's work from the previous 10 years.

Museum collections

*The

Hood Museum The Hood Museum of Art is owned and operated by Dartmouth College, located in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the United States. The first reference to the development of an art collection at Dartmouth dates to 1772, making the collection among the ol ...

, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH *Patterson Museum of Contemporary Art, Patterson, NJ *New England Museum of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn, CT *The Foundation for God Realization, Ashland, OR *Sun Bank, Fort Lauderdale, FL *EIS, Stamford, CT *The Rubin Museum, NY

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Klineman, Hedy 20th-century American painters 21st-century American painters Living people American women painters 20th-century American women artists 21st-century American women artists Year of birth missing (living people)