Paul Klee is a giant of twentieth-century art and one of the great creative innovators of the time. Witty, inventive, magical, his exquisite paintings resist easy classification. He is mentioned in the same breath as Matisse, Picasso and his Bauhaus contemporary Kandinsky. He cuts a radical figure in European modernism. His influence on abstraction can be seen in the works of Rothko, Miró and beyond. And yet, for an artist of such stature, there is still so much to discover about him.
An artist as well as a musician, the lead singer of The Horrors finds a lot in common with Paul Klee. ‘Expression can be as raw as you want it to be,’ says Faris Badwan. He feels that to look at a work by Paul Klee is akin to watching the artist’s train of thought, “almost as if you are watching the piece grow, with Klee discovering things for the first time’. Klee has been a huge source of inspiration to Faris Badwan, who says of his own practice that ‘it is good to get lost in art, to almost let it lead you’.