Anita Klein: Out Of The Ordinary

Anita Klein is an artist of the everyday and the personal. For more than forty years, she has produced thousands of paintings, prints and drawings depicting her immediate family – husband, daughters, grandchildren, and herself – going about the very ordinary activities of daily life: watching television, cooking, reading, driving to school, soaking in the bath, getting dressed, cleaning the house, choosing a pet, going on holiday, or just cuddling up and sharing tender moments with loved ones. She captures these seemingly unremarkable domestic scenes with such humour, sensitivity and beauty to create an intimate visual journal with which everyone can identify. Influenced by Italian Renaissance fresco painting, her direct style pares down forms into strong and simple shapes, transforming the images into contemporary icons that reveal a joyful and unselfconscious delight in the common 'dailiness of life'. Witty, charismatic, warm, and poignant, she has become one of Britain's most popular artists and printmakers. As the Guardian wrote, ‘no British artist has more thoroughly explored the female experience of family in the past 30 years than Anita Klein’.

This book is a selection of around five hundred of the artist’s best-loved prints going back to her students days. It presents a charming chronological record of the family’s day-to-day life through the decades, seen from the artist-mother’s perspective, as they grow and change in their respective roles within the household. One can also follow Klein’s development as a printmaker through that time, from the simple monochrome drypoints in the 1980s, a consequence of the practical and financial demands of being a young parent, through to the more colourful and elaborate prints of more recent years. Post-pandemic and post-lockdown, this delightful diaristic archive of life’s small and familiar moments takes on added significance for it is a timely reminder of what daily existence is really about.