THE CAAM PRESENTS THE PAUL KLEE. CHILDHOOD IN THE ADULT STAGE EXHIBITION

From 19^th October to 5^th January 2008, the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria presents Paul Klee. Childhood in the adult stage, the most important exhibition of the Swiss artist to be held in Spain in the last decade.

Mark Gisbourne, the curator, provides a contemporary view of the artist and analyses, based on philosophy and evolutive psychology, what remains of the child in the adult artist. The exhibition contains a selection of fifty-five works on different supports: drawings, water colours, oil paintings, puppets from the Zentrum Paul Klee (Switzerland) and the SFMOMA (Museum of Modern Art. San Francisco.US), whose artworks are owned by Professor Carl Djerassi, one of the leading Klee collectors, making it a unique opportunity to admire work which has rarely been exhibited in Europe.

Paul Klee was an artist who understood, perhaps, more than any other the deep emotional well and creative residue that came from his early life and childhood experiences. By following Nietzsche's famous aphorism, Klee fully comprehended "this is the higher species of the art of painting which only a few understand."

With the selection of works in this exhibition, the CAAM contemplated the persistence of childhood characteristics in Klee’s work, something he maintained and developed throughout his adult life. The focus is less on the art of childhood, which is to say Child Art, and more upon the 'never forgotten' creative pathways, which Klee carried forward and made into a pictorial universe that was completely and uniquely his own. He was born in 1879, and positioned at the beginning of the modern age. While the themes of his works reflect the transition from the world of static systems to the world of dynamic speed and motorised development of the twentieth century. With drawings and other works from early childhood, Klee’s artwork touches upon many of the most important aspects of the transitional world of 'modern art' in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Klee died in 1940. Each period of the artist's life, the early Swiss Years, the Munich years leading to Blue Reiter (1911) and thereafter, the Bauhaus Years (1920-31), and the late flowering intensity of the artist's child related drawings after his return to his native Switzerland, are all reflected and presented in the CAAM exhibition.

Therefore, this exhibition shows Klee's lifelong fascination with line as sign and with graphic media, with its relation to music and the theatre, with the small scale world of the hand held, with nature's codes and its hidden signage. Almost everything in Paul Klee's work is about the human, both in its scale and far reaching aspiration. Never an abstractionist as such, he symbolically abstracts from the world, always directing the viewer back towards what is central to an imaginative human life. It is a quality of the decidedly humane, that has subsequently given his work such a universal appeal. In the sixty years or so since his death, at no time has he been out of favour. Klee's human appeal has influenced countless artists, and continues to do so today. He is a soothsayer of what we know but all to frequently forget. His humanist credentials are self-evident, and no part of the daily human round of our lives is so small and unimportant that we cannot learn something from it. Paul Klee learnt and interiorised this lesson well, and his art bears a defining testament to the living child with the man.

On the occassion of this exhibion, the CAAM has edited a catalogue with texts by professor Carl Djerassi, Dr Kudielka, and Mark Gisbourne, the curator, including pictures of the works on show.