2017
28 LPI lenticular print,
Alu-dibond
140 x 120 x 2 cm
Edition of 3

Witnesses (2017) consist of five large-format lenticular prints mounted on aluminium dibond. The lenticular system is the only imaging process that allows for several different images to be displayed in a single print. At least two images taken at an inter-eye distance are required, though it is most common to blend four or more images. These prints are made with a special stereoscopic camera that captures multiple images simultaneously.

“Numerous artists such as Gilbert & George, Philip Taaffe, Matthew Barney, Gernot Bubenik, Marie-Jo Lafontaine and Andreas Gursky can all be linked to Worringer’s legacy, and yet it was only in the 1990s that pioneers of digital painting like Robert Lettner and Peter Kogler succeeded in breaking the boundaries of traditional ornamental painting by developing new pictorial forms.

The lenticular prints of Klein can be seen in this tradition of Worringer, Kandinsky, and Bense, and only through this classification does their significance for art of the 21st century become visible. What Robert Lettner had to say about the effect of his digital paintings can also be applied to Klein’s lenticular prints. Lettner claimed that every shape appears to be familiar, but that the shapes do not truly exist in those forms: “It only looks like one. More accurately, it is the fragment of a structure that is identifiable as such throughout our civilization and throughout nature and the world but ultimately breaks free if it is stretched, passes from being a microcosm to a macrocosm. Ultimately it becomes infinitely large, and I experience these intervening spaces. The structure, the ornament, is no longer identifiable. But if I move away, the ornament once again becomes the perceivable detail to be identified. All in one, one in all.”.

With these words, the mutation of forms in space is aptly described, as the appearance of the lenticular prints continuously shifts.”. 

Harald Kraemer

The video is of the lenticular work Witnesses I-V.