Klute is an extraordinary, compelling artist. The 2015 Hennessy Portrait Prize winner, she has a string of honours and accolades to her name. Working across a range of means and media, she is fascinated by how we see, experience and deal with the external world “as subjective agents”. She observes us – and herself – as the strange creature we are.
The Irish Times, May 8, 2016
In the accompanying catalogue essay for Klute’s debut show at the gallery, former head of collections at IMMA, Catherine Marshall, described the artist’s studio ‘as a cockpit of creativity, a rich breeding ground where she can generate artwork about the biological process, using the fertile ground of her studio and her art as a way of thinking about the phases of life from birth to death, the mechanisms of the body and the underlying psychological states that are prompted by it’. Marshall believes that Klute imbues her work with an acute sense of the commonality between humans and other living organisms and their shared vulnerability, a kind of democracy of living creatures that makes her work far more than a re-hash of the Renaissance ‘ages of man’ theme.
The interdependence of all life contained within and constituting the Earth's biosphere remains central to Klute's work and the life teeming and trailing over the edges of these paintings is a reminder of the dependence of our species on the others we share the planet with and of the folly of pretending otherwise.
Since graduating in fine art from IADT in 2006 with a first-class honours degree, Klute has had solo exhibitions at the RHA Gallery, the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny, as well as the Molesworth Gallery. She has shown in the group exhibition Rencontres Internationales at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and was selected for FUTURES 2011 at the RHA. Major public commssions undertaken include a portrait bust of Eileen Grey for the grounds E-1027, the designer's iconic house on the Côte d'Azur, as well the sculpture of Luke Kelly at Spencer Dock, on behalf of Dublin City Council. She won the 2015 Hennessy Portrait Prize, awarded under the auspices of the National Gallery of Ireland, and the Hennessy-Craig Scholarship at the 2015 RHA Annual Show. Her portrait of Sr. Stanislaus Kennedy, commissioned by The National Gallery of Ireland, was added to the National Portrait Collection in 2014, as was her porcelain and concrete bust of Garry Hynes in 2017. Vera is an Associate Member of the Royal Hibernian Academy.