Information
About the Exhibition
« Foreign Affairs » is Roman Klonek’s second solo show with Urban Spree Galerie and will be held from 12.11.2021 to 18.12.2021 in Berlin. The exhibition runs in parallel with "Takeru Amano x Shigeki Matsuyama: Duality"
Roman Klonek (b. 1969 in Poland, based in Düsseldorf) uses the traditional hand-crafted technique of woodblock printing to create comics-like pop compositions which blend the aesthetics of vintage comics, propaganda posters, Russian and Japanese folklore, as well as catch words in Cyrillic and Japanese scripts.
Klonek re-carves the same plate for each color. By the end of this process, the wooden plate cannot be reused. The artist limits his palette to between 3 and 5 colors, working with oils for an intense, striking finish. In a digital age, he embraces the unique imperfections in each of these hand-crafted prints, explaining, “in the old days they did woodcut printing in spite of the mistakes and today you do it because of the mistakes.”
Each print comes in a very limited run of 8 woodblock prints.
Klonek has exhibited in Germany, Los Angeles, London, Paris among others and most recently exhibited at the Liège Engraving Triennial. His works are part of the permanent collection of the Colección SOLO in Madrid. His first monograph, "Woodcut Vibes", was published in 2021 and is available at Urban Spree.
