In contrast to the tradition of artists creating works informed by a consistent visual language, David Klamen embraces an aesthetic diversity that is directed instead by an exploration of an expanding idea. In recent years, the scale of his work has shifted from tiny to larger than life, the imagery from pictorial to digital abstraction, and the tone from the silent to the aggressive, yet in each there is a common commitment. All of these works use various visual images and processes in order to investigate the question of how we know our culture and ourselves. His recent work tests epistemological strategies as diverse as memory, empiricism (the idea that the sole source of knowledge is direct quantifiable experience), OP Art (and its implication that knowledge may be a purely retinal experience), introspection, meditation, and others. In this investigation, Klamen plays with the history of art, utilizing modern and pre-modern conventions as metaphors for our communal search for meaning.

Klamen’s work has been exhibited in international-level solo and group exhibitions across the US, Europe and Asia. His works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin; The Berkeley Museum of Art in California; The Illinois State Museum, Springfield; the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; the McNay Museum, San Antonio, and others.

Klamen earned his Bachelor's of Fine Arts at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, and his Master's of Fine Arts in Painting at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.