b. Phoenix, AZ,1996
Seffa Klein is a French-American artist whose multidisciplinary practice—spanning paintings composed with elemental metals, brick sculptures, drawing, installation, writing, and music—is grounded in the intersection of science, aesthetics, and meditation.
Klein became fascinated with stars while growing up in Arizona. She would travel with her family to Arcosanti, the experimental desert community, and sleep on the town’s concrete dome roofs to watch the Leonid meteor showers using her father’s telescope. In Northern Arizona, the first international Dark Sky place, she lived in a sustainable "Earthship,” a home built into a hillside with a roof flush with the top of the hill. There she could stargaze with no horizon interference. These experiences culminated in an obsession with stars as a portal to states of existential awareness. Klein studied astrophysics and quantum mechanics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and became focused on the molecular scale as a representation of infinity.
Klein works primarily with bismuth metal because its formation is tied to the highest energy events in the universe: collisions between neutron stars, the force of which creates a black hole. Klein is fascinated by a substance that is birthed in a state of pre-light and space, that alternatively swallows and flings color and light. She views her material process as a micro-mirroring of cosmic events.
Klein’s recent bodies of work incorporate molten heavy metal applied to heat-resistant woven glass canvas. The colors in the work are derived naturally from the metal itself, and are expressed using a controlled oxidation process. These images are defined by a unique structural coloration, in which light waves are refracted by the surface rather than absorbed like a pigment. Klein’s paintings provide a site for the continued interaction of light, and thus possess a dynamic brightness. She is inspired by similar instances of structural color in nature, such as blue bird feathers, beetle wings and pearls.
Klein lives and works between Los Angeles, Arizona, and Paris. In 2023, Klein’s New York solo debut WEBs: Where Everything Belongs, in which these works were first exhibited, was written about by artnet, CNN, and Surface Mag. Her first international solo debut opened May 15, 2024 at Galerie Poggi in Paris, France and was written about in Le Monde, Art Basel, Les Echos, Le Quotidien de L’art, Paris Match, and Autre Magazine.
