Anita Klein studied at Chelsea and the Slade Schools of Art in London. From 2003 - 2006 she was president of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers (PRE) and she has work in many private and public collections in Europe, the USA and Australia, including the Arts Council of Great Britain, the British Museum and the British Library. She has had many solo exhibitions in London as well as worldwide, and three monographs of her paintings have been published. Anita Klein now divides her time between studios in Bermondsey, London and Italy.
"It is nice to have a real humorist recruited to the ranks of gifted painters. She is to be congratulated on livening up our dreary lives" Art Review
“Ravel said he wanted his music to be complex, but not complicated. Anita Klein might say the same of her art. There is a grand simplicity to her works, but that is not the same as saying that they lack subtlety and ambiguity. On the contrary, they have the sort of unselfconscious directness that comes from living and breathing art for so long that it becomes second nature”
John Russell Taylor
"I don’t think that art should need to be explained in words. If my pictures
don’t communicate without a commentary then they are not good enough. I think we all have a lot in common and the people who like my work see themselves and their lives in it. I don’t want you to think you have a picture of me on your wall, I’d much rather you felt that it was you. What I want to do is to celebrate ordinariness, the poetry of the everyday. The things we are all too busy to notice. I have been very inspired throughout my career by
early Italian renaissance painting fresco painting. Those are the pictures that I find most beautiful. They hit me in a way that I can’t explain. I can feel moved to tears and ideally I would like my work to be beautiful like that. It’s what I’m striving for – a balance that feels calming to look at, but like Giotto or Piero della Francesca, includes the viewer by conferring dignity and beauty on the ordinary and depicting it as miraculous" Anita Klein
