"You're a beautiful draftsperson. Your figures seem to move from one state to another. You are painting narrative subjects, but your intent is beyond the narrative. I love the idea of leaving the narrative to convey something outside the narrative - the instant of transformation....I guess the process of painting itself is a metaphor for transformation. That's what I like about your recent paintings, like Medusa Incarnate. It's as much about the materials as the form, it's all happening now, together, at once. Your work is transforming into something very exciting. (interview excerpt, Dec 2010)."
- Jack Rasmussen, Director and Curator, American University Museum

LOOK DEEPLY: The female form, an undersea world, a dream state? It's not easy to decipher what goes in Micheline Klagsbrun's strange flowing paintings, but her work in the solo show "Immortal Coils" at Studio Gallery is consistently compelling, like canvas portholes through which one can glimpse a half-forgotten, slightly menacing vision"
- Catherine Ahearn, Washington Post Express 06.11.09

"Klagsbrun's earlier focus on the ways in which a drawing or a painting could become a visual carrier of a narrative has slowly given way to more intriguing evocations of the idea of change itself. And, even as she remains attached to the idea of the human figure as a compositional core, she has become far more confident in her movements between two impulses: the expressive force of a body and the decorative aspects of its form as an abstraction. Most importantly, she has gained a new level of comfort with the role of chance in her work. In some of her recent paintings, for instance, a generous red stain on an unprimed canvas slowly becomes immersed within, but not suppressed by a reclining female figure painted over it. In others, on the other hand, a spill of color remains just that, with all of its allusive indeterminacy. This willingness to keep her images ever more open to various ways of seeing has brought Klagsbrun closer to Ovid, even as she has slowly left his poem behind and turned towards a more general exploration of the relationship between form and formlessness."
- Aneta Georgievska-Shine, 2009, Dept. of Art History, University of Maryland.

"Installed in the Washington Gas Windows, Micheline Klagsbrun's paintings provide a quiet reservoir for thought…. Shimmering, shadowy layers of text, like delicate sheaves of skin or falling leaves, are draped in front of the paintings to obscure and reveal their images, creating levels as if one were looking into water. In the paintings figures emerge and recede from water by virtue of the artist's exquisitely sensual modeling and layering of surfaces of paint... These paintings have come about-metabolized from, in the artist's words-Ovid’s Metamorphoses... The artist has immersed herself in these stories, reading them over and over, and has emerged through the painting of them to distill on canvas moments of emotional essence.

There are treasures to behold for passersby who pause to thoroughly take in this work."
- Pat Kolmer 2003