Soon he began showing with Gallery Jones, Vancouver in 2005 and short after with Odon Wagner Contemporary Gallery, Toronto, Ontario. Shooting with a large format camera, a SINAR 5x7”, Klemm’s photographs were large, bold and painterly.
What followed was a series of powerful and often epic projects featured widely in more than 30 solo exhibitions in Canada, the USA and Europe and in featured shows as: at the FOTOFEST Biennial Houston, Texas, the Foto & Photo Photography Festival Maderno, Milan, Italy, the CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival, the Blue Sky Gallery Oregon Center for the Photographic Arts, and a travelling exhibition throughout France, starting in Paris, organized and sponsored by the German Goethe Institut.
Eric’s project “Silent Warriors”- Portraits of North American Indians, was awarded 1st prize at Prix de la Photographie Paris and so was his landscape project “Italian Journey” – following in the footsteps of the great German poet J.W.v. Goethe. Germany’s magazine “STERN” published 14 pages about “Silent Warriors” who became Klemm’s best known coffee table book out of 6 made during this extremely creative period of time. Eric Klemm’s career in photography span over more than 50 years.
Eric Klemm has his work in private- and corporate collections in Canada, the USA and Europe and in museums and public art galleries as: the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Portland Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, London and the Saarlandmuseum, Saarbruecken, Germany.
It was in 1999, when he picked up painting again, his other great passion. Eric painted a lot between 2004 - 2015 in the new studio of his house on Salt Spring Island.
Eric Klemm’s new acrylic paintings are in the modernist tradition of Joseph Albers, Molinari, Ellsworth Kelly and Mark Rothko, who described his work in 1950 as: “the simple expression of the complex thought”. Multiforms developed into a signature style. Art for me is an experiment that begins in one corner of the canvas and ends in the other. The creation of something from nothing.