Anna & Bernhard Blume

Anna and Bernhard Blume were a collaborative duo of German artists, best known for their large-scale, black and white photographs. Throughout their practice, they captured themselves dynamically engaging with objects in the world, resulting in humorous investigations into space, art history, and contemporary life. Anna was born Anna Helming in Bork, Germany and Bernhard was born in Dortmund, Germany, both in 1937. They went on to study at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 1960 to 1965, where they met and were married in 1966. The Blumes have been collaborating since then in a "lifelong photo-novel" that involves staging themselves in scenes of German middle-class life gone frantically out of control. The absurd and humorous quality of the Blumes' work stems largely from their original staging of scenarios that, rendered with the blur of motion, slyly undermine certainties about human reason and social order. Notably, their work is entirely self-produced, from conceptualization to finished product, with total mastery of technical components. "We paint with our camera,” Anna Blume explained, “and this painterly work continues in the lab, too."

Anna and Bernhard Blume's work has been widely acclaimed, resulting in such exhibitions as at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in 2005, The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1989, and documenta 6 in Kassel in 1977. Bernhard Blume died in Cologne, Germany on September 1, 2011. Anna Blume continues to live and work in Cologne.

Submitted by Buchmann Galerie