Klaus Enrique photographs different parts of the human anatomy that he shapes with different organic elements. He tells us “I saw a face where no face existed.” In each photograph he captures “our powers of abstraction, a power that is uniquely human.”

Klaus Enrique’s “Arcimboldism” will be featured in the Griffin Museum’s Atelier Gallery at the Stoneham Theatre in Stoneham, MA, April 27 – July 7, 2016.

A reception will be May 18, 2016 at 6:30-8:30 p.m.

“Working on a photograph in which I surrounded a human eye with thousands of dried leaves, I was struck by the idea for this project: “make face with leaves”, I wrote down.” says Enrique.

After extensive research Enrique found out that someone had already created a similar idea, he explained, “Knowing that other people before and after Arcimboldo had done similar work was not reason enough for me to create my own series, however. For me the reason came from my own original moment of Pareidolia. I saw a face where no face existed. The reality was simply hundreds of leaves randomly arranged over a human eye. Yet my mind was telling me that a face was there.”

Born in 1975, Klaus Enrique grew up in Mexico City. He studied genetics at the University of Nottingham, England, and received an MBA from Columbia Business School in the City of New York. Enrique was a freelance SAP consultant before he turned to photography, which he studied at Parsons and at the School of Visual Arts. Enrique began to receive worldwide attention in 2007 when his portrait of “Mother & Daughter” was considered for the Photographic Portrait Prize at Britain’s National Portrait Gallery. Subsequently, Enrique has been nominated and short listed for various awards. In 2011, Klaus Enrique was the winner of Photo District News Curator Award / Emerging Artist of the Year for Still Photography. In 2013, Enrique’s “Vertumnus” was included in “The History of Still Life in Ten Masterpieces”, as the Tenth Masterpiece alongside works by Cezanne, Goya, and Warhol. In 2015, Enrique was commissioned to create the Peter & Gwen Norton Family Christmas Card. Enrique’s work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Leslie/Lohman Museum and the Haggerty Museum of Art. He currently lives in New York City.