For Edgar Allan Poe, there was nothing as “poetical” as the death of a beautiful woman. For the past eighty years, Los Angeles’ creative minds have taken this musing from the Baltimore-based poet and splashed it into the popular imagination through noir and detective films. The beautiful dead woman—or, depending on the example, the beautiful sad woman who is not yet dead—is a hallmark of the (often misogynist) genre and a staple in Proceed to the Route, Tania Franco Klein’s solo exhibition at Rose Gallery through February 15, 2020, at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, California.

Exhibition Review by Deborah Krieger