Vera Klement’s paintings feature multiple images or even multiple panels that are frequently rendered in a different technique or style. This approach is intended to allude to the different movements of a symphony and show change and variation within the more static medium of painting.
Klement was born in Danzig (today Gdansk, Poland) in 1929 and fled the Holocaust with her family to settle in New York City. She studied art at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture and moved to Chicago in the 1960s, where she taught at the University of Chicago from 1969-1995. In 1973, she was a founding member of the Artemisia Gallery, one of the first feminist cooperative galleries in the Midwest.
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An abstract painter known for large canvases filled with symbolic references, Klement exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the Chicago area and was included in group shows at such major institutions as The Jewish Museum, NYC; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Terra Museum of American Art; Corcoran Gallery of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Museo de Arte Contemporanea, Sao Paolo, Brazil. She is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Grant, and a Pollock-Krasner Grant. Her art is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of American Art, Smithsonian; and many others around the country.