Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition dedicated to the late artist Irwin Kremen’s collage works. This marks the gallery’s third show of Kremen’s work, highlighting the depth and subtlety of his intricate compositions made over the course of 50 years.

Irwin Kremen (1925–2020) was recognized during his lifetime for his evocative formalist approach to collage, assembling fragments of weathered papers and other ephemera to create compositions that resonate with a quiet intensity. His works reflect a considered engagement with materiality and abstraction—exhibiting a reverence for the accidental beauty in the tint and texture of found elements. Despite their intimate scale, Kremen’s collages possess a commanding presence, their layers of color, torn edges, and geometry imbuing a strong sense of their own history and transformation. Kremen invested in maintaining the integrity of his materials, carefully hingeing each element rather than flattening the whole with glue, allowing a sculptural quality to emerge in each work.

After establishing himself as a professor of clinical psychology at Duke University, Kremen turned to making visual art in his forties. Developing a fascination with collage, he dedicated himself to a meticulous process that imbued his formal constructions with a rare depth of feeling and precision. Kremen’s practice, first encouraged and championed in the 1970s by friends such as John Cage and M.C. Richards, has resulted in work that has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The National Gallery of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago.

This exhibition will feature a selection of Kremen’s collages from various periods, highlighting his ability to consistently, through the decades, fuse color and texture into delicately transcendent visual statements.