Shoplifting images from art history, John Kleckner’s drawings subscribe to a complex relationship between authorship, contemporary art, and its lineage. Rejecting post-modern notions of appropriation as allegory, Kleckner engages in the old masters’ tradition of studying his predecessors – not as a means of perfecting technique – but to satiate his desire to infiltrate and possess the immaculate. Attracted to the timeless subject matter of portraiture, mythology, and botanical motifs, Kleckner recomposes archival prints and paintings as a way to make them his own.
