Misha Kligman: The Luminous and The Given installation view, May 1 – September 1, 2024. Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas. Photo: EG Schempf
As I reflect on Misha Kligman’s current show at the Nerman Museum, I think about how the symbols and icons we use both in art and everyday speech hold us at a middle distance from reality. They capture neither the unspeakable immediacy of the present, nor the unknowable expanse of eternity. The paintings on display in “The Luminous and the Given” attempt to dissolve that middle distance. They let the unspeakable and unknowable — being itself — become apparent through inherited tropes, natural environments, and evocations of grief, love and mortality. At the same time, they convey doubts about the adequacy of painting.
“The Luminous” sits at the center of the exhibit, facing visitors as they enter. A spectrum of colors circles a meadow of birds — themselves rainbows of blue, yellow, green, red, brown, white and gray. With all the materials and finishes at the modern artist’s disposal, there is restraint in the use of dull oils on scratchy canvas: this is not the luminous, but only a representation. Browns and muddy ochres mix among the primary colors. The radiance of the earth itself, perhaps. Or mimicking the enlarged color vision of birds, who can see UV light. We can only approximate that spectrum through analogy, scrambling the traditional ROYGBIV and lacing unconventional earthtones into the rainbow, as Kligman does here — gathering and abstracting that alien world into an encircling frame.
Regardless of exact interpretation, it seems that a rare, luminous moment has been caught. What are such moments? Brief flickers of spiritual insight, intimately connected to one’s surrounding landscape. To see as a bird sees would be to make the invisible visible. Maybe Kligman isn’t literally after the sight of a bird, but he does seek out those moments when the unseen congeals into the seen. I think of encircling as a metaphor for what is happening here: the artist is trying to frame and catch being itself.
To the right of “The Luminous” is a painting called “The Near and the Far.” A foreground of flowers has caught on fire. That is, it is not the flowers burning but the foreground itself, like flammable nitrate film stock. Flaming ruptures, edged with the colors of the rainbow, open onto distant stars. The here gives way to the final there of outer space, the twinkling void at the beginning and end of being. This hyper-juxtaposition creates a wildly unconventional still life, a nature morte in which Nature itself is on display as it dies: a transitional conflagration in which we can see ourselves as a thin skein hovering between here and there, life and death, planet and cosmos, flowering-dying.
Or perhaps instead of nature we should say ecology, as that is what we mean to show, in our contemporary era, when we represent plants and animals. These are the beings we are entangled with, whose worlds — like ours — are or may very soon be on fire. That fire reveals a cosmos beneath. We glimpse it as our species teeters at the brink of destruction. The word “nature” recognizes mortality at the level of the individual; “ecology” can think it at the scale of species — that is, extinction, a new level of precarity.
“Chance,” the second painting in the show, performs a similar trick as “The Near and the Far,” but without any fire, and here clothed in overtones of human love and loss. One figure holds another. The second figure, however, is nothing more than a silhouette—again revealing a cosmic sky within it. The first appears to be flesh and blood, though with a typically brushy and expressionistic coloring that leaves a rusty, even wounded patch on their arm, and which allows distant tree trunks to be visible through their cranium. A yellow-green halo surrounds both their heads. Is this one person seen in two guises? The self of the landscape—the here, the near—and the self of the cosmos—the ultimate faraway? Their heads are slightly different shapes. To identify bodily with the painting feels like holding onto a loved one’s presence after they have died.
Kligman’s paintings continuously flirt with allegory and received symbolism. In some ways, it feels as if these paintings begin by thinking in the space of symbols we have inherited, starting logically with givens in order to arrive at the new, the unknown, the luminous. A tree with a bandaged branch. A naked old man smelling flowers. A snake dividing the words “you” and “I.” A lone figure shoveling snow at night. A body full of stars. A man pointing the way through snowy woods. Washing the feet of the artist Joseph Beuys. Naked figures in the forest, bathing, as in Gauguin. Inherited tropes are used to jumpstart the artist’s and viewers associative patterns, a means of accelerating into mystical territory.
It is a tightrope act to employ tropes in this manner. Each viewer will bring their own specific calibration of inherited associations, which will influence whether they are either drawn into the paintings’ depths of feeling or held at a skeptical remove. The quasi-iconography can be at once obvious and mystifying. And part of Kligman’s art is the way painting troubles an easy “reading” of allegory and symbolism. Visible brushstrokes emphasize texture over concept. The play between vibrant and dour coloring is a constant source of tension.
When I first look at “Becoming” and “The Death” — painted three years apart but arranged one above the other as a diptych — I think it’s obvious what they’re showing. Something like: the luminous living body giving way to dead clay. But if I allow myself to stop and gaze for a little longer, that certainty starts to evaporate. I lose track of what symbols I thought had been encoded here, what previously received tropes, what transformations seem to occur as a flat, human-shaped body of water in “Becoming” rises into a mound of earth, speckled with bright flowers, in “The Death.” Meanings proliferate. A significant amount of ambiguity has been added.
There is “Curtain of Tears,” in which the proverbial vale of tears has a become a veil of tears. I find this painting satisfyingly odd in its depiction of so conceptual a subject. It has a strange play of depths: lines of tears, like strings of beads, part to reveal a gray angel before a gleaming white tree. The angel may or may not be a statue, the kind you come across in a cemetery. This is what it’s like to visit a grave, especially when the loss is new, or you haven’t visited in a long time. The grays, the sudden gleam of natural beauty — a luminosity that is enough to save you from complete despair.
Throughout Kligman’s work —not just the pieces on display here — there are currents of grief, terror, catastrophe, and fading histories, which exist alongside spiritual inquiry. In previous exhibits, the Kansas City artist, born in Kazan, Soviet Union, has more explicitly addressed the Holocaust and persecution in the Soviet Union. These histories, themes, and emotions act as the vehicles for mystical perceptions, coloring them with a visible spectrum. For Kligman, the eternal forces that pervade our lives, and are vaster than them, are part of the great emotional currents in our souls and the histories that have brought us into being.
Kligman’s latest show has moved away from references to history to focus more on landscape, which leads me to wonder: what is the connection between historical grief and ecological catastrophe? How do we think these things not only together, but as one, as somehow constitutive of the very condition of being — or, at least, the condition of being alive at this moment? It seems that grappling with the nature of our cosmos itself must be part of it.
“Misha Kligman: The Luminous and the Given” continues at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, 12345 College Blvd., Overland Park, through Sept. 1. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Friday, Saturday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. For more information, 913.469.3000 or www.nermanmuseum.org.
