Barbara Bloom

Barbara Bloom (born July 11, 1951 in Los Angeles ) is an American artist. Her works can mainly be assigned to postmodern conceptual art .

Life

Barbara Bloom was born in Los Angeles in 1951. From 1968 to 1969 she studied at Bennington College and in 1972 at the California Institute of the Arts , from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. It was there that she met the artist John Baldessari .

Bloom later lived in Amsterdam and Berlin for a few years. At first she was financed by a DAAD scholarship, which she received in 1986.

Her artistic work soon found its way to the public through first exhibitions and her degree of awareness grew steadily. She had regular solo exhibitions in New York and Berlin. Further grants and awards followed, for example the Due Mille Prize at the Venice Biennale and the Artist in Residence Award from the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio.

In the 1990s Bloom often gave guest lectures at various universities, both in the USA - for example at Yale , Harvard and the School of Visual Arts - as well as at European institutes such as the Berlin University of the Arts and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. From 2005 to 2006 Bloom taught at the ICP-Bard Graduate School.

In 1995 Bloom was seriously injured in a lintel, which affected her for several years and influenced her view of life and death and thus also her work.

In 2008 she published the book The Collections of Barbara Bloom as a kind of anticipated legacy of her work. The title and content correspond to the exhibition of the same name, which took place in Berlin and New York that same year and offered an overview of her life's work to date.

Today Bloom is counted among the most important representatives of postmodernism. Her works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the MAK in Vienna and the Serpentine Gallery in London.

Barbara Bloom currently lives and works in New York City .

plant

Bloom's works mainly include installations , but also photographs . Often photos and other media are combined with furniture and similar objects.

Many of their installations consist of more than just one object . As a rule, she puts together collections whose individual objects are related to each other and to the exhibition space. In doing so, she combines - often in surprising ways - self-made with found or bought elements. Bloom occasionally changes the arrangement and selection of the objects, so that each exhibition brings new ideas to the viewer. She prefers to use the moment of beauty to captivate him, topics such as transience and death are conveyed more subliminally.

Examples of her exhibits are a carpet with footprints that reappear in a dance video or a photograph, a Playboy magazine in Braille, an upholstered chair with an x-ray of her teeth on the fabric, and a pornographic image printed on a grain of rice has been.

Some of her works refer to other artists, for example a complete collection of the writings of her adored Vladimir Nabokov , for which Bloom has designed new covers, or a compilation of postage stamps showing the work of contemporary artists.

Exhibitions (selection)

• 1989: Forest Of Signs - Art in the Crisis of Representation , Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
• 1990: Barbara Bloom: The Tip of the Iceberg , Galerie Isabella Czarnowska, Berlin
• 1995: 4th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul Biennale
• 1999: Moving Images. , Gallery for Contemporary Art , Leipzig
• 1999: The Museum as Muse .: The Reign of Narcissism , Museum of Modern Art , New York
• 2000: Things in the art of the XX. Century , House of Art, Munich
• 2002: Barbara Bloom , Galerie Six Friedrich - Lisa Ungar, Munich
• 2003: A Clear Vision , Deichtorhallen, Hamburg
• 2004: Place for the Self / Amnon Barzel apexart , New York
• 2005: Long Playing Barbara , Krakow Gallery, Boston
• 2007: D'Ombra / The shadow , MAN Nuoro
• 2008: The Collections of Barbara Bloom , International Center of Photography , New York
• 2008: The Collections of Barbara Bloom , Martin-Gropius-Bau , Berlin
• 2009: The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 , Metropolitan Museum of Art , New York
• 2010: Barbara Bloom - Present , Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
• 2011: ATLAS. How to Carry the World on One's Back? , ZKM , Karlsruhe
• 2015: Barbara Bloom: Framing Wall , Museum of Modern Art, New York
• 2018: Décor: Barbara Bloom, Andrea Fraser , Louise Lawler , Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Scholarships and Awards

• 1986: DAAD scholarship
• 1988: Due Mille Prize ( Venice Biennale )
• 1989: The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award
• 1991: The Frederick Weisman Foundation Award
• 1997: Artist in Residence Award (Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio)
• 1998: Guggenheim grant
• 2007: Fellowship from the Getty Research Institute
• 2008: AIGA design award (for her book The Collections of Barbara Bloom)

literature

• Dave Hickey, Susan Tallman, Barbara Bloom (Ill.): The Collections of Barbara Bloom. Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-86521-621-2 .
• Peter Wiench: Bloom, Barbara . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 11, Saur, Munich a. a. 1995, ISBN 3-598-22751-5 , p. 596.

Publications

• Ghost Writer / And if they haven't died ... Passagen Verlag, Vienna 1994, ISBN 978-3-85165-093-8 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Barbara Bloom in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• List of exhibitions, collections and galleries with works by Barbara Bloom, kunstaspekte.de
• Barbara Bloom at www.artcyclopedia.com
• Video interview with Bloom about her exhibition The Collections
• Ken Johnson: Barbara Bloom - A Portrait of the Artist, in Bits and Pieces The New York Times , February 8, 2008

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} biography and work of Barbara Bloom at artdaily.com
2. ↑ Biography Barbara Bloom  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 94 kB) galleriaraffaellacortese.com, accessed on August 12, 2012.  
3. ^ ICP-Bard Graduate School Resident Artist Projects and Critique Faculty
4. ↑ ^{a b} Interview in the art art magazine  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ The Collections of Barbara Bloom, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.