Berggruen Gallery is proud to current Bless Babel, an exhibition of recent work by San Antonio-based artist Matt Kleberg. This exhibition will mark the gallery’s second solo exhibition with Kleberg. The exhibition can be on view via October 16, 2025. The gallery will host a gap reception for the artist on Thursday, August 21 from 5:00 to 7:00 PM.
In Bless Babel, every portray builds round a singular central area of interest, suggesting the absence of a topic. Confronted with this emptiness, the viewer finds themselves on the heart of Kleberg’s geometric abstractions. Influenced by architectural and ritualistic areas, the works in Bless Babel examine the tropes via which conception is framed by institutional or private perception. Kleberg’s work usually are not concerned with goal reality, however somewhat in how perception transforms our relationship to house and objects. These work usually are not portals, except you consider they’re. They don’t seem to be home windows, except you consider they’re.
This exhibition derives its title from Donald Barthelme’s 1987 essay Not Understanding, through which the author and critic considers uncertainty, improvisation, and discovery as basic to the artistic act. Barthelme speaks of commentary, elaboration, exegesis, and contradiction as crucial modes of engagement between a chunk of artwork and the sooner works of earlier makers that inform it. Babel and the scattering of languages supply an instance of how completely different approaches to the identical idea are inherent to human expression. Kleberg’s new work embrace the constraints of explicit shapes borrowed from Tramp Artwork frames and Italian Renaissance devotional objects, to discover how completely different resolutions can come out of a number of iterations of the identical motifs.
Kleberg’s work contradict themselves, oscillating between ecstasy and oblivion, exuberance and tranquility. Hues of pink, terracotta, and shiny blue radiate amongst moody browns, maroon, and sap inexperienced. Scumbled surfaces complicate illusionistic shadows; inside house collapses into itself as one strikes nearer. Shimmering like tv static or speckled concrete, colours that seem strong break aside upon inspection. Chromatic undertones shift of their nature–maybe ready to coalesce. Some work tower, their stripes and bands undulating, monumental and welcoming, formal but playful. Indebted as a lot to American folks artwork traditions as to Duccio and the Sienese College, Kleberg’s work pay homage—but with their vacancies and their tensions, the drama is of their very own conjuring. A body inside a body inside a body. The pleasure is within the not-knowing.
