Gloria Klein Pushed Abstraction to Its Limit. Now the Art World Is Catching Up

The human mind is miraculous, but fallible. The anxious acrylic arrangements of late New York-based painter Gloria Klein evoke its glitches. Beneath their superficial frenzies, however, lie methodical mathematical systems—manifestations of Klein’s obsessive nature. These patterns are prone to failures of their own. They also epitomize art-making as an act of self-exploration.

Klein’s latest solo show “Crisis Management” opens January 9, 2026, at Anat Ebgi New York, presenting many of her later paintings for the first time. Klein’s first hometown exhibition in decades arrives with the news that Anat Ebgi is now representing her estate. But despite the years that have passed, Klein is hardly an art world unknown. Born in Brooklyn in 1936, she devoted her entire adult life to art. She featured in the “Lesbian Art and Artists” issue of the groundbreaking feminist publication HERESIES, created portraits of famed critics like Arlene Raven and Lucy Lippard, curated the 100-artist exhibition “10 Downtown: 10 Years” at PS1 (before it became part of MoMA) in 1977, and even counted herself a member of the radical West Coast-based Criss Cross art cooperative. More recently, in 2023, Anat Ebgi sold one of her works for $30,000 at Frieze Los Angeles.

Nonetheless, Klein remains a lesser known painter. Stefano Di Paola, a partner and senior director at Anat Ebgi, attributes that fact to Klein’s intersectional marginalization as a queer woman, and also to her genre-defying style, which blends hard-edged abstraction, the Pattern and Decoration movement, systems-art, and more.

Di Paola has tended Klein’s legacy since 2021, when he first visited public artist Vivien Collens, the custodian of Klein’s entire archive. “These things hadn’t seen the light of day in 30 to 40 or 50 years, some of them,” he recalled of Klein’s paintings. “It really felt like I was discovering an ancient tomb.”

He’d connected with Collens at the advice of April Richon Jacobs, who curated a small selling show of Klein’s work for Christie’s that year. In 2024, Di Paola organized “Unwinding Unbinding” at Anat Ebgi Los Angeles—a solo exhibition inspired by Klein’s extensive, compulsive, and vulnerable journals, composed like concrete poetry. Anat Ebgi showcased Klein’s hash-laden abstractions of the 1970s at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach. Now, “Crisis Management” will highlight her more complex creations of the 1980s and 1990s. By reading Klein’s writing and interviewing as many of her peers as possible, Di Paola has started parsing out this complicated woman’s story.

Enigmatic Origins

Little is known of Klein’s childhood—and not just because she didn’t have kids. “I think as a queer person, there is an understanding that oftentimes there is a separation with your family, and you end up with a chosen family,” Di Paola said. One journal entry, for example, declares “I am Gloria Klein, not Mary’s daughter. I am Gloria Klein, Martha’s friend.” Di Paola knows for certain that Klein had at least one sibling during her Brownsville youth—he’s met the niece she bequeathed most of her works on paper to. Meanwhile, Klein herself used to say that her earliest artistic experiences came from helping her father match enamel paint to wallpaper on home renovations.

She started off studying math and economics, however, earning an undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College in the 1950s—then spent the 1960s taking semi-professional courses at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art and the Art Students League of New York. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when Klein was in her mid-30s, that she started an MFA program uptown at Hunter College, studying under the likes of conceptual artist Robert Barry and Color Sensation artist Robert Swain.

The 1970s also gave rise to Klein’s seminal motif—the diagonal hash mark. One five-foot by five-foot canvas could contain 3,600 of them. In 1978, Klein told sculptor Mary Ann Unger that the gesture arose out of anger.

“I was sharing a beach house with people who irritated me—and worse, I didn’t even have a place to paint,” Klein remarked. “So, I sat around and drew. I would strike out on graph paper with jabbing marks…[D]iagonals are like striking out at someone or something… [and] I think in this situation the diagonals somewhere reflect my anger at the people who were around me at the time… I felt isolated and was in a controlled rage doing the hatch marks on graph paper.”

What beach was it? Who were these housemates? Di Paola doesn’t yet know. “I’m pretty sure the beach house was at Amagansett [on Long Island] because it seems that she went there a lot from the journals,” he said. The same entry that proclaims she’s a friend rather than a daughter also chants “I am Gloria Klein, at Amagansett.” The names in her journals, meanwhile, appear often as just first initials. They’ve proven harder to track down. The people Di Paola’s asked haven’t offered any firm answers.

Above all, Klein’s mystery stems from a spiky remoteness that lasted her entire life. “She had a lot of feelings and a lot of opinions, and she could be reclusive, for sure,” Di Paola said. “She definitely was, in the way that she worked, but she was a difficult character.” An artist’s success, of course, requires more than creative talent. Klein resisted the fame-bringing game.

Evolving Systems

Di Paola estimates that Klein produced hundreds of paintings and drawings from the late 1960s on. Graphs recur amongst Klein’s earliest work—a likely holdout from her time studying economics—and lingered beyond 1971, when the hashmark entered Klein’s lexicon, lending her the confident freedom of artistic identity.

“There’s some very early works of hers where you can literally see her taping out the grid,” Di Paola said, adding that “as she moves on, it’s something more akin to Agnes Martin, where she just starts using a straight edge and simply marking, but not actually drawing out, a huge grid.”

Even then, Klein continued planning her paintings on graph paper, working through their patterns—and inadvertently supplementing her regular therapy sessions by working through herself. “I like what I just finished,” she wrote in her journal one day. “I was moved, therefore cleansed. The shit was extracted from my head.”

Klein’s paintings of the 1970s were rigid. The hues of her evenly spaced hashmarks progressed from left to right and up and down according to clear formulas. “Occasionally those systems would fail,” Di Paola continued. “There’d be a place at which they overlapped in an incorrect way, and those were the only places in which she allowed herself to choose something different.” He compares those moments to concepts in Jack Halberstam’s 2011 work of theory , which embraces failure as freedom.

Thus, Klein began experimenting in the 1980s, incorporating scale shifts implying foreground and background. These blocks started hosting discrete systems, like the quilts she found herself examining, “which in and of themselves are their own mathematical logic and systems,” Di Paola pointed out.

“Moving into the ’90s, she begins to re-synthesize all of those different systems that she was using at the same time,” he continued. That’s why Di Paola wanted to focus on this particular decade in “Crisis Management.” Color assumed the role of emotive control variable amidst these converging systems.

Klein’s Legacy

Indeed, Klein the woman and Klein the artist both remain difficult to pin down. Her practice simultaneously straddled Minimalist, Conceptual, Color Field, and systems-based art, all while operating parallel to the rising Pattern and Decoration movement, which thrust sensual women’s work to the fore.

But, “Gloria was not about excess or joy of painting,” Di Paola noted. She didn’t appear in the movement’s shows after 1978—though she was in “With Pleasure,” the movement’s first survey, six years ago at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. “She fits more closely with the Criss Cross group, which was coming out of Drop City, and then Boulder,” Di Paola told me, “a highly understudied, highly misunderstood group that lasts for only a number of years.”

Di Paola generally favors artists who refuse classification; he also works with multidisciplinary artist Faith Wilding, and the estate of performer Tina Girouard. “It’s only, I think, within our generation that there are curators, writers, thinkers, who are interested in looking at these figures who are multidisciplinary or don’t fit cleanly inside of a box, who defy these ideas of the movement,” he said. “I think that that’s a very recent addition to the art historical canon.”

Klein almost certainly impacted the artists she let in and befriended. She’s since inspired a rising generation of algorithmic artists as well, since she pioneered the use of such systems before computers came about.

“I don’t think that an artist needs to contribute to the context of art history in order to be valuable,” Di Paola contended. “In fact, I think that is so often the reason why a lot of artists, as we talk about, get left out of the narrative, because we don’t allow artists to exist in their own right.”

“She was using the logic of her own psychology and her own mental state to understand the world around her,” he said. “Is she contributing to art history? I’m not sure. Is she contributing to the way that we can understand how an artist uses interiority as a concept? Absolutely.”