Joseph Klibansky - Beyond the Clouds

Year: 2020
Edition: 40,000 pieces
Signed: Unique number on the back of each artwork.
Technique: mixed media painting (Acrylic paint canvas screen printing ink)
Image dimensions: 3 cm x 3 cm

This lot consists of 4 unique pieces of the large artwork. Each individually packaged in the original packaging that the customers of ABNAMRO and MeesPierson received in 2020. The numbering is printed on each piece separately on the back. Example (see photo) is a random example.

In 2020, ABN AMRO and Mees Pierson celebrated their 300th anniversary. To mark this anniversary, Joseph Klibansky created his largest painting ever.
It was a canvas of more than 38 m2 with the title “Beyond the Clouds”.
This huge canvas was cut into more than 40,000 pieces measuring 3cm by 3cm. Each small piece of 3x3cm reflects the entire artwork and is a piece of the big picture and is therefore an original, unique, Klibansky.

The artwork provides an optimistic view of the future and reflects the ability to look ahead. A dream image is sketched that is about creating positive changes in the world of tomorrow. The work reflects the ambition of people to always want to make steps forward and to continue to develop.

Watch the special making-of film of the creation of this artwork on youtube.
https://youtu.be/Tv6Xj3xg7A0

Joseph Klibansky (Cape Town, 1984)
His father Leon is South African, and his mother Immechien is Dutch. In 1985 the family moved to the Netherlands. Klibansky did not have an art education, but studied economics. In 2016 he opened a gallery in the PC Hooftstraat in Amsterdam. In 2017 his first solo exhibition took place, in Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle.

His work
Joseph Klibansky’s work explores the relationship between a thing and its essence, between what we see and what an image implies. The sense of precarious balance found in his recent paintings and sculptures reveals how sadly dystopian an image can be that at first glance seems cheerfully utopian. It thus reveals how utopia and dystopia can coexist in the same image. Venturing into the realm of phenomenology, Klibansky revisits questions of perception that have fascinated philosophers and art historians, and attracted the attention of artists as well.
In his recent paintings, Klibansky juxtaposes architectural and natural landscapes, most of which the artist himself photographed during his travels. Butterflies, birds, nymphs, and impressionistic sparkles mingle with images projected onto giant screens, street signs, and sparkling cars. While nothing can convey reality better than a photograph taken to remember a place you’ve been, Klibansky uses a lie to tell the truth. In an attempt to shed light on the formal and conceptual dynamics with which Klibansky approaches his phenomenological investigation, we will first look at the Dreams of Eden cycle, begun in 2014, which marks a turning point compared to the earlier New Urban Wonderland (2006–13), in which the artist echoes social condemnation. As we have already mentioned, Klibansky applies to the surface of his painting numerous photographs taken during his travels. While composing them, he changes their proportions and does not adhere to the rules of perspective. After the formal construction of the landscape has been determined by computer, Klibansky makes prints on cotton paper, on which he applies watercolors with shades typical of computer-processed images and which also evoke the psychedelic colors of the 1960s and 1970s, associated with the utopian vision of hippie culture.
The sense of accumulation together with the quality of the colors bring into play an illusory and ideological vision of the world that is shattered, as is the fate of all utopias. The finish of the painting is a perfectly transparent resin coating, with rounded sides, and a signature that is always printed in the same way on each work, as if it were a logo, giving it the effect of a giant postcard. If we were actually dealing with reproduced images on postcards, Klibansky's Dreams of Eden would not depict a real place, but rather a kind of ideal urban landscape that gathers the characteristic elements of different cities. Together they result in the manifestation of a metropolis in which distances are neutralized and cultural connotations are multiplied. By bringing Dubai, Paris, Venice and New York under the same sky, Klibansky presents a scene that for some can be the most desirable place in the world, and for others a nightmare. What could be more satisfying than the idea of finding yourself in a city that allows you to visually appreciate all the places you have wanted or want to visit? And how terrifying would it be to find yourself in a place where reference points deny information about that place rather than give it? If Klibansky's panoramas were reproduced on a postcard, the text on the front would not say "Greetings from Paris" or "Greetings from London", but rather "Greetings from Klibansky". Paradoxically, such postcards could be sent from any location; but what is equally paradoxical is that they would not identify any location. Klibansky's entire work suggests contradictory messages, making contradiction one of the basic elements of his phenomenological research. By stripping history of every element reproduced in an environment without identity, the Dreams of Eden paintings emphasize the crisis of a humanist position, because they illustrate the broken relationship between an individual and his cultural context. The relationship an individual has with a place consists of visits and memories that are layered over time, resulting in a sense of belonging. Once a landscape surrenders its history to a context capable of receiving all things, an individual can lose awareness of his position in that environment. Because Klibansky's landscapes destroy the concept of a border by which one defines one's belonging to a place, they ultimately represent a global nation in which different identities destroy each other by overlapping. In the absence of a border, one might see a place that can finally welcome all people. When the viewer looks at the paintings of Dreams of Eden, he is forced to take a stand on the architectural transformations that have taken place in the great cities of the world in recent decades.