leg III Painting

1961 Born in Philadelphia, Pa, USA 1983 - 1988 University for applied sciences, Trier Diploma: fashion design. Lives and works in Johannesburg,, South Africa. Monique van Klev's Paintings "The woman and her body" is the prime subject of the US-born and meanwhile in South Africa living painter Monique van Klev for over a decade. Working with oil on canvas her style iridesces between figuration and abstraction. Her paintings never show the entire motive but separate a certain detail. It is typical for her paintings that they are worked in layers. The actual subject matter can be seen in the colored structures or in the almost black surfaces. Monique van Klev's canvases often take their imagery from popular media: advertising and film stills with erotic/sexy scenes where the female body plays a decisive role. While these sources being mostly pretty explicit van Klev transforms the scenes into abstraction by using just a certain extract and reducing recognisable forms to volatiles shades of themselves, sometimes by an solarization like effect. So she is leaving the viewers to reconstruct the subject in their minds, guiding the view to the senses from the inside rather than extrinsic excitement.