Victoria Donohoe, writing in The Philadelphia Inquirer, described Klabunde as an artist who elevates printmaking because he takes great interest in exploiting the special qualities that make etching an expressive medium with unique characteristics rather than using it, say, only as a method of reproducing pencil drawings.
[6] Typically, the artist's etchings were full of Gothick elements (Hellmouths, gargoyles, and elaborate tracery) and fantastic details (acrobats dangling from ropes presumably suspended on skyhooks, and cablecars with dragons on their roofs.)
[8] Klabunde is sometimes compared to Francis Bacon, as the two artists share an ability to create the sense of an encounter with a palpable human presence placed in a frontal pose at the center of the composition, invariably against dark backgrounds that cast the figures in stark relief.
While Bacon assaults the viewer with the visceral jolt of seeing the human image flayed like a side of beef, Klabunde confronts us with the culture shock of a spiritual tradition far different from our own.
In the etching Cycle of Sangsaric Phenomena #III, for example, the mystical qualities of the Tibetan Book of the Dead are conveyed with surreal figures orbiting a darkly cross-hatched cosmos around a brilliant orb that could appear to be a portal to their next incarnation.
[11] By contrast, in The Seven Deadly Sins series, various preposterously grotesque beings recall Odilon Redon's desire to create figures that are impossible according to the laws of possibility.
When we view Klabunde's work we recognize the bloated, covetous figure of Greed and the fanged monster of Anger as symbolic surrogates of our own worst traits.
Working with Charles Altschul, publisher of New Overbrook Press, the artist's book contains seven hand-pulled intaglio prints placed loosely inside a handmade folio box with unbound pages of text.
[13] Klabunde's drawings imagine the characters as bulbous, Bosch-like concretions, twisted into contortionist poses, and labeled with such titles as The Lull, The Spectacle and The Last State.
The next year Klabunde traveled to Paris and spent time with Beckett, who upon the book's publication, had sent his warm congratulations to the publisher and the artist for those terrifying images.
[16] Klabunde's imagery and iconography, although highly individualistic, is often traced from the work of Bosch, Dürer, Breughel, Callot, Rembrandt, Blake, Goya, Meryon, Redon, Klinger, Ensor, Magritte, Klee and Picasso.