ANNA&BERNHARD BLUME  

TRANS-SKULPTUR

May 14 - June 20, 2009

After Anna & Bernhard Blume’s first show in 2000, featuring the series “Mediemismus, Mahlzeit, Transzendentaler Konstruktivismus,” as well as 24 drawings and texts entitled “Reine Empfindung” (signed by Anna Blume), beaumontpublic is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition TRANS-SKULPTUR.

The current show, which marks an important step in Anna & Bernhard Blume’s oeuvre, presents new large-scale photo-scenes especially created for the exhibition. Reflecting on art history, and more specifically on abstraction, TRANS-SKULPTUR tackles the myth of modern art by transferring the ideology of creativity into everyday realism.

The Blumes focus on the metaphors attached to objects, for the latter are laden down with convention. They explore everyday objects as a symptom of the times, generating transfers from object to subject and vice-versa, moving in relation to each other in superposing actions and disintegrating the viewer’s ever-secured references. The beautiful clownish approach to the dramatic self puts both artists and viewer in the same reflexive position. The work reveals realism beneath abstraction, it points to the real that is yet to come. This process transforms things as such into mere phenomena.

Steeped in the tradition of performance art, this process of questioning also entails relishing a situation in which all is set flux or even “smashed up”, as Bernhard Blume puts it. This is not to suggest that their work is destructive: “Our wish was and is always just to relativize different levels of order.” And the Blumes present this in their very own ironic way.

The photographic action’s final result consists in a picture on digital Epson Fine Art photo print. But the real making of the work lies in the long and elaborate performing art sessions of Anna & Bernhard Blume who stage their work themselves in a body-oriented action. The whole work is done jointly, from designing the sets, costumes, shooting sessions, developing of the negatives and producing of the enlargements. During each of these steps the artwork is refined, polished and painted. “We paint with our camera” Anna Blume avers, “and this painterly work continues in the lab, too.” There is no digital manipulation involved. In order to take what are in fact quite dangerous photographs, the artists make use of securing ropes, safety nets, mattresses, etc. This way of putting objects in an independent life has become a customary idiom of an entire genre of mystery films, sci-fi stories, and the like. “In a certain sense, we are possibly pioneers of perception which today is the domain of an entire film industry”, the artists say with a twinkle in their eyes.

The artist duo Anna & Bernhard Johannes Blume (born in 1937 in Germany) work primarily in the medium of photography. Their works are known internationally and are represented in major museum collections.