In a remote hangar on the outskirts of Toulouse, a Lufthansa Airbus A320 glows iridescent under the lights. Not from its metallic fuselage, but from a dizzying cascade of brushstrokes on its body. This is not a corporate stunt or a conceptual prank,it’s the latest work of Marja Klein, the reclusive Dutch-German painter who has become the most controversial figure in contemporary art by doing what no painter before her has done: use aircraft,actual, operational aircraft,as her canvas. For Klein, the plane is not a vehicle but a surface.
Her practice began unassumingly enough: graduate work in neo-expressionist abstraction at the Städelschule, a few residencies in Iceland and Patagonia, and a brief stint observing some aeronautical engineers. But it was her 2019 manifesto, “The Extended Canvas: Toward a Transatmospheric Aesthetics,” that revealed her ambition. In it, she argued that traditional painting had reached a saturation point, both spatially and semantically. “If canvas is a skin,” she wrote, “why not paint the organs of global movement? Why not paint the very arteries through which tourism and commerce flow?”
The first iteration of this idea,Fuselage No. 1 (For Barnett Newman),landed, quite literally, at Charles de Gaulle in early 2021. A retired cargo jet, reactivated temporarily for the work, bore a single red zip line down its side, splitting a field of hand-painted electric blue. It drew criticism from both art world purists and aviation traditionalists. “It’s neither safe nor comprehensible,” said one Parisian curator/pilot, who didn’t want to be named. “It’s somewhere between performance and vandalism.”
Undeterred, Klein’s work escalated. In collaboration with several independent air fleets and a little-known Estonian aerospace coating company, she began producing what she calls aero-paintings: labour-intensive, site-specific works executed directly onto the planes, which are then returned to flight. Each one requires months of bureaucratic negotiation, FAA consultations, and custom pigment development to withstand the UV exposure and atmospheric pressure changes. And yet, to Klein, all this is part of the piece.
These aircraft,glimpsed only briefly by passengers on the tarmac or through terminal windows,become ephemeral galleries of motion. “I’m not interested in permanence,” she said in a rare interview. “I’m interested in distribution. In becoming part of someone’s memory of a journey.”
Her 2024 project “Flightpath Diptych” involved two Boeing 737s: one painted in a palette of pale greens and muted greys based on 1950s Soviet military maps; the other inscribed with layers of coded writing drawn from declassified Cold War-era weather reports. The planes crossed paths over the Arctic Circle during the summer solstice, their coordinated flight paths generating a skyborne choreography visible only to satellite tracking systems and a small group of Klein’s paid subscribers who were given access to the live telemetry data.
Art historians struggle to categorize her work. Is it painting, performance, installation? Environmental art? Some invoke Robert Smithson’s Non-Sites or Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels; others trace her lineage to Gutai, to Yves Klein, to Panamarenko or Hipplo. But Klein herself resists the comparisons.
In so doing, she has raised thorny questions about authorship, temporality, and visibility. Philistine aviation crews mean that her planes are often cleaned or repainted without notice. A work might last six months or six days. Sometimes, she leaves only a signature in a hard-to-spot area- these stay airborne longer according to plane spotters/collectors around the world who have welcomed her work, tracking her oeuvre with vigilance, flight logs, and their familiarity with global aviation routes.
Yet for those who catch a glimpse,on a runway in Jakarta, during taxiing in São Paulo, or parked beside a generic corporate fleet in Oslo,Klein’s work lands like a glitch in the visual field. A disruption of the technocratic gloss of modern air travel. A reminder that the sky, too, can be colonized by art.
Since this piece was written we have heard that the B&A is reportedly in talks with Klein to acquire her entire series of aircraft skins in digital replica form.
