JOSH KLINE

From 3D printing, advertising and image editing to productivity-enhancing substances, Kline’s work examines how the modern working class is treated as expendable labour amid social and political issues such as climate change, automation, disease and democratic erosion. In Blue Collars (2014–2020), the artist combines video interviews of blue-collar workers and 3D renderings of their disembodied heads and limbs to paint an unsettling portrait of their economic precarity. Confronting the dehumanisation of the workforce, Kline’s practice offers viewers a disturbing yet prescient vision of an inequitable society prizing productivity at the expense of its most vulnerable.

Kline’s work is found in leading collections including The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim and The Whitney Museum, New York; The Baltimore Museum of Art; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His works have been widely exhibited in the United States and internationally, in exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, and MoMA PS1, New York; The Hirshhorn Museum and The National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; LAXART, Los Angeles; ICA Boston; ICA Philadelphia; MOCA Cleveland; Portland Art Museum; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; KW, Berlin; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; Modern Art Oxford, UK; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; Louisiana Museum, Denmark; and MCAD Manila, Philippines, among others.

Notable solo exhibitions include Climate Change (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Project for a New American Century (2023), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The artist also recently participated in major international festivals including Ten Thousand Suns (2024), 24th Biennale of Sydney; and Wild Grass: Our Lives (2024), 8th Yokohama Triennial.

Kline had his residency at STPI in 2025 and 2026.

Courtesy STPI