Vera Klement Press Release

New Public Works by Painters Vera Klement and Dan Ramirez unveiled at

McCormick Place West

Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony & Tours

Thursday, August 2, 2007 10:00 a.m.

Chicago—Alfedena Gallery is pleased to announce the unveiling of new permanent public works at McCormick Place West by two of Chicago’s most acclaimed artists, Vera Klement and Dan Ramirez. These works are part of the impressive art-filled expansion of McCormick Place that was overseen by Chicago curator and arts advocate Paul Klein. There will be a ribbon-cutting ceremony with tours of the building to follow on Thursday, August 2, 2007, beginning at 10:00 a.m. RSVP by calling 888-592-6885 or by e-mailing ribboncutting@westgrandopening.com

Born in the Free City of Danzig in 1929, Vera Klement has been one of Chicago’s most significant painters for over 40 years. She is noted for visually dismantling the single picture into multiple canvases, fracturing the image and reconfiguring it into an uneasy new poetic entity. Her removal of objects from their natural environments and floating images of them on white backgrounds allows these iconic images to assume mythic qualities. For the McCormick Place West expansion her three panel painting titled, Daybreak, Birds Over Lake Michigan, uses her signature approach to evoke the sublime qualities of Lake Michigan at dawn. A large blue bell sounds the end of night and the coming of day. The sounds of the bell are echoed by a flock of gulls as their forms dissolve into the pastel hues of dawn. Vera Klement is a professor emerita from the University of Chicago. She was educated at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture in New York, NY. Her work is represented in Chicago by Alfedena Gallery.

Born in Chicago in 1941, Dan Ramirez has spent a career creating elegant, minimalist abstract paintings. Ramirez’s formal elements – monolithic, shimmering vertical bands, evanescent gradations of tone, razor thin tapering bars – have often been inspired by musical compositions. For the McCormick Place West expansion, Ramirez has applied his formal vocabulary to interpreting Chicago author Nelson Algren’s 1952 acclaimed prose poem, Chicago: City on the Make. Ramirez’s eight vertical paintings in the concourse are each 13 x 8 feet and take a different stanza of the poem as their inspiration. Using acrylic polymers sprayed onto aluminum panels, Ramirez uses his geometric vocabulary of horizontal and vertical bands of subtle and bold colors to evoke the sharp, staccato-like use of language employed by Algren to capture the human rhythms of the city. Dan Ramirez is a professor emeritus from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He earned an MFA from the University of Chicago, and a BA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His work is represented in Chicago by Alfedena Gallery.