Anat Ebgi has announced it’s representation of The Estate of Gloria Klein. And will present Gloria Klein’s 1970s hatch-mark abstract paintings in Kabinett at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025, Booth F28 December 3rd–7th, 2025. Klein’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, Crisis Management, will be on view in New York from January 9th through February 28th, 2026.
Gloria Klein (b. 1936, Brooklyn, NY; d. 2021) was an American abstract painter whose mature works are grounded in repetition and systemic order. She came of age in 1970s New York amid rapid aesthetic and cultural shifts, developing an enigmatic, self-determined logic that shaped her earliest abstractions. These patterned fields—dense with repeated diagonal strokes—generate visual frequencies evoking psychological or urban chaos: the jostling of bodies, the overload of signage, or the coded language of digital information.
Color is the carrier and distributor of meaning; through pure abstraction she visualizes the complexity of people and society—its problems and solutions, movements, feelings, and experiences. She pulls viewers into her environment of order and disruption. Klein’s obsessive pursuits expose a tension between the cool authority of a system and the messy realities of lived experience. Formulas falter and the rigidity of the grid yields to the stress testing of her palette.
Klein described her hatch-mark works as “pictures of the structure of reality and the structure of space.” These self-developed systems and processes experimented with color and composition to express something about the intricacy of social and emotional life, subjects she obsessively explored in her unpublished early sketchbooks. Interlocking diagonals hum with rhythmic density, musical resonance, and the unexpected incidents that arise from competing hierarchies. Algorithmic in appearance, her paintings and works on paper read as frequencies, digital signals, or early lines of code, probing the interplay of order and breakdown.
About the artist
Klein began her adult education with a BA in Economics at the Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Following which she attended the Brooklyn Museum School of Art, the Art Students League of New York, and finally in 1970 she enrolled at Hunter College where she took classes with conceptual artist Robert Barry and Robert Swain. She obtained her MA in art from Hunter College in 1973. Klein exhibited widely in group and solo exhibitions throughout the 1970s and 80s including at The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT; P.S.1., Long Island City, NY; 112 Workshop, New York, NY; A.I.R., New York, NY; and Hunter College, New York, NY; among many others.
During her lifetime, Klein was awarded several awards, including artists’ residences, scholarships, and grants such as the International Women’s Year Award (1975-76); Studio Space at Vermont Studio School, Johnson, VT (1988); Honorable Mention, Turchin Center for Visual Arts, Boone, North Carolina (2005); Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2005), and Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant (2007). Her work can be found in many private and public collections and corporate including The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, along with Chase Manhattan Bank, Chemical Bank, Citibank, Lehmann Brothers Corporation, Sherman and Sterling, Swiss Reinsurance Company, Texaco, and others.
