Fables and Tattoos
Barbara Klunder
paintings and papercuts
January 17 - February 22, 2025
Opening Reception Friday January 17, 7-10pm
Paul Petro Contemporary Art is pleased to welcome folk medievalist and local legend Barbara Klunder in her first exhibition with our gallery.
Fables and Tattoos
For generations fables and folktales have been spoken, embellished, printed and painted to pass on the concepts of good and evil, greed and compassion everywhere around the world.
Warnings of great punishments or promises of eternal rewards from gods, witches, kings and queens have always been delivered to teach right from wrong in the simplest of ways.
How humans dealt with catastrophic weather events, society’s hierarchies, or individual desires, these tales and stories have become part of every culture, mythology and belief system. They continue today in books, movies, comics, games and songs.
Painting on wood, as Hieronymus Bosch did, seemed appropriate to me with these medieval fables. My delight was to combine various biblical, folkloric and modern elements into one image, such as Adam & Eve as the Tortoise & the Hare. The Lion & the Lamb blend in with the Three Blind Mice and subversively suggest the Aesop’s fable of the Lion & Mouse’s unusual contract. The knife floating above reveals the probable outcome for all.
Humanity has always had a violent streak, and we are again in immense danger from our own inventions. Protection from weapons and technology was the concept embedded in my BulletProof Vest paper-cuts. The battle of Beauty & Life against Death & Destruction using the fragility of paper appealed to me.
Heroic protection, the historical purpose for tattoos - those fierce images wrapped around patterns of nature, inked into skin - revealed tribal information and loyalties, and warnings to outsiders. Modern tattoos, the personal expressions of cultural identity, fascinate me. Gwendolyn MacEwen was so hypnotized by ancient Egyptian symbols, I was inspired to create four tattoos from images in her poetry.
We love the idea of Good conquering Evil in the stories we tell ourselves and to our children. Angels versus devils, halos versus pitchforks. Whether in books, poems, paintings or song, we historically, endlessly, have repeated our deep desire for peace and love in the face of danger, to have happy endings. But fables and folktales are mythology, a fabulously rich and necessary magic in the face of earthly reality.
Barbara Klunder
January 2025
Barbara Klunder was born in Toronto and attended the Ontario College of Art as a teenager. She lives and works on Toronto's Ward's Island.
From the back cover of a new publication which accompanies Klunder's exhibition is the following quote:
Barbara Klunder is an artist gifted in many genres and media, from book and magazine illustrations, 4 font designs, to paper-cuts, puppet-theatre and textile works.
In this collection of small gouache paintings on wood on view at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, she has been inspired by historical folktales, fables, and belief systems, gently subverting them in order to, yet again, warn us about our fragile environment.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Textile Museum of Canada, the University of Toronto Rare Book Collection, The Arts & Letters Club, and Toronto Archives.
Barbara Klunder Folktales is available on our multiples and small works site, here.