The German artist couple Anna and Bernhard Blume (1936-2020 and 1937-2011) are internationally renowned for their black and white photographs.
The couple staged performative actions and captured them on camera. They are mostly bizarrely arranged, domestic scenes. The two artists themselves are the performers, she with a perm, wig and neat little dress, he in a small checked suit and hat. Gender patterns, roles and clichés as well as codes of bourgeois behavior are ironically and comically counteracted by the Blumes. Potatoes fly through the air, shards of broken plates cover the kitchen floor, furniture constructions collapse and people with distorted faces handle all kinds of everyday objects. What the people in the pictures are doing is anything but conforming to the rules, it is crazy in the best sense of the word.
Anna and Bernhard Blume carried out every step of the artistic process themselves - from composing and taking the pictures to developing and enlarging the photos in the laboratory. With their photo series, they satirize the petit bourgeois world of the 1970s and 1980s. The couple were largely inspired by the actionism of the 1960s. Anna and Bernhard Blume met as students at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where they both studied from 1960 to 1965. The couple lived and worked in Cologne. Their works have been exhibited in international museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
The exhibition at the Kunsthalle Krems shows large and medium format series of black and white photographs, complemented by a small selection of color Polaroids.
October 12, 2024 to March 23, 2025
