Robert Klein Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition by acclaimed New York-based photographer Arne Svenson. The exhibition brings renewed a en on to two of Svenson’s most poignant series: Sock monkeys and Strays. The show is on view from December 15, 2025 through January 31st, 2026. There will be an artist’s discussion on January 10, 2026 from 2-4pm in Cahoots with Stoots, between Svenson and photo historian Jennifer Stoots. This will be Svenson’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.

Known for his me culous, painterly approach and his background in special education, Svenson’s practice is rooted in seeking the essence of his subjects—whether they are humans observed from a distance or discarded objects found in the periphery of daily life.

Sock monkeys: portraits of personalities

In the Sock monkeys series, Svenson treats humble, handmade dolls as subjects of high-art portraiture. Selecting from a massive collection of nearly 2,000 sock monkeys, Svenson used a large-format camera to capture each figure in the style of 19th-century black-and-white portraiture. Removed from the context of play and childhood, the sock monkey becomes an ambiguous stand-in for the human figure. Posed, isolated, and me culously lit, these figures hover between humor and unease. Their s tched expressions suggest character without biography, invi ng viewers to assign emotion, narrative, and even vulnerability to what is, at its core, an inanimate object. This series reflects Svenson’s long-standing interest in how photographic framing can animate the overlooked and provoke complex psychological responses.

Strays: the beauty of the abandoned

Complementing the portraits of the sock monkeys is Strays - a project featuring portraits of kittens borrowed from a rescue facility in upstate New York. In this series, Svenson focuses his lens on the abandoned and the overlooked—items and beings that have lost their place in the social or domes c order. Like his controversial and celebrated series The neighbors, Strays utilizes Svenson’s investigative eye to find beauty and narrative in the banality of the everyday, asking the viewer to consider the history and dignity of the marginalized or left behind. "How can I photograph kittens in a way that would connect to the underlying theme in all my work, which is to cast light on the unseen, the ignored and overlooked. Was there a way to take a portrait of a kitten and not have cuteness dominate the image? Was it possible to ignore those big, entrancing eyes and find the ki en's inner life, his back-story? Did kittens have back stories?”.

Together, Sock monkeys and Strays delve into themes of projec on, presence, and the thin boundary between observer and observed. Whether confronting a toy imbued with imagined life or an animal navigating its own autonomy, Svenson’s photographs challenge viewers to reconsider how meaning is constructed through looking—and how photography mediates inmacy without narration.