Dion Kliner's Ugolino (Foot 2), one of the types of sculptures he will be working on with the help of a Gottlieb Foundation grant.
Vancouver-based artist and critic Dion Kliner has received a $25,000 award from New York City’s Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.
The Gottlieb Foundation’s individual support grants were founded in 1976 to “encourage and recognize mature painters, sculptors and printmakers who have dedicated their lives to developing their art regardless of their level of commercial success.” This year, 12 artists received the grants out of a pool of 454 applicants.
Kliner—who has contributed criticism to Canadian Art, among other publications, as well as assisted with installations at the American Museum of Natural History and the Dia Art Foundation—says he intends to use the grant to continue his exploration of the sculptural base.
As Kliner clarified to Canadian Art in an email, the base is “not the pedestal” of a sculpture, but rather “that indeterminate bit of landscape between the figure and the pedestal.”
Having explored this subject in various ways since 1999, Kliner plans, in his new works, to model directly over an armature in plaster and leave the plaster raw.
As Kliner writes, he hopes that his new sculptures explore the concept of enough—that is, “At what point is a sculpture complete enough to carry the weight of what is intended?”—as well as necessity and loss.
