Detail

The artist Erika Giovanna Klien, who was born in Borgo di Valsugana in Trentino, studied from 1919 to 1924 at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts which since the days of the Secession had the reputation for being a progressive educational institution and workplace for visual artists. Following the Jugendstil tradition, courses were given in ornamental forms under the leadership of Franz Cizek. In the first half of the Twenties this lead to an intensive discursive examination of with the international avantgarde. Taking as his model Italian Futurism and its visualization of dynamic processes of movement as the central artistic concern, Cizek developed so-called kineticism. “Kinetic Composition (Head and Hands)” by Erika Giovanna Klien, the most independent of Cizek’s students, is a prominent example of this trend. Despite extensive abstraction, there is still a residual representationality — the folded hands and one head at the top left. These could be completely cut out, however, to be replaced by pure forms completely disassociated from natural motives.