Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles is currently presenting Nervous System, a solo exhibition by Kate Klingbeil which features four recent paintings inspired by the artist’s experiences with chronic illness and her resulting medical anxiety caused by navigating the deteriorating American Healthcare system.

Klingbeil creates her idiosyncratic sculptural paintings by embedding found materials including rocks, sand, ceramic and zebra mussel shells (from an invasive mollusk) into fields of thick paint. Klingbeil is interested in the interwoven and interdependent structures within the human body, and the relationship between our environments, our supports, and our emotional health.

Chronically ill patients often find themselves without answers from medical professionals, and spend countless hours researching their symptoms and the connections between them, building maps of possible solutions to healing. Klingbeil finds this similar to the artist’s challenge of making less obvious connections between ideas in order to arrive at something that speaks to new ways of looking at the world.

“Painting allows me to turn the inside outwards and is the visible expression of my nervous system. Each mark is a physical testament to a sensory experience that regulates me. Painting becomes both a metaphor and a literal translation of the impulses of the nervous system.”

Kate Klingbeil (born 1990, Grosse Pointe, Michigan) received a BFA at California College of the Arts (2012). She has had solo exhibitions at Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2021 & 2022); Hesse Flatow, New York (2021); SPRING/BREAK, New York with Field Projects (2020) and has been in group exhibitions at Alexander Berggruen, New York (2023); Nino Mier, Los Angeles & New York (2021 & 2023); Steve Turner, Los Angeles (2020); Nevven Gallery, Gothenburg (2019); Andrew Edlin, New York (2019); Paul Kasmin, New York (2018) and Andrew Rafacz, Chicago (2017). She lives in Milwaukee.

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