Emil Michael Klein
Passage
26 September – 8 November 2026
We are pleased to announce the next exhibition at the Amden Atelier.
Emil Michael Klein (b. 1982, lives in Zurich) presents new textile works in a site-specific installation. The exhibition opens on Saturday, September 26, 2026, from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. and runs through November 8, 2026.
With Passage at the Amden Atelier, Emil Michael Klein presents textile works in a site-specific installation. In his work, which focuses on painting, the curtains embody an expanded, transmedial concept of the artwork. Central to these works is the depiction and multifaceted exploration of the artist’s signature, which in his textile pieces assumes the role of the figure and emerges as a logo.
The experience and perception of these works in this disused yet still weather-exposed agricultural building in Amden am Walensee will differ fundamentally from those in an institutional exhibition or a commercial gallery. Here, the textile works are likely to be perceived less in terms of their specific artistic form and more as elements that structure the space, move in the wind, and change in response to the natural light entering the room.
Historically, Emil Michael Klein’s paintings can be situated in the context of non-figurative post-painterly abstraction. While his paintings always appear as excerpts from an open, minimally structured, and unlimited energetic surface, the curtains emphasize the vertical in the room and express a physical presence. Klein is hardly concerned with mimetic representation and illusionistic image effects. He works on the concrete appearance and sensory evidence of the works. His works can be experienced as an artistic reflection of the aesthetic.
Since its founding, the Amden Atelier has been a place of artistic experimentation, which being far removed from classical museum conditions lends itself to the development and exhibition of new kinds of artwork. Some of the artists who have exhibited there, many of them at the start of their careers, created works for their exhibition in Amden that were to have a defining impact on their artistic development thereafter.
