Gabi Blum
NY TEA TIME WORK IN PROGRESS (same procedure as ever ff.)
Performance
Sunday, February 19, 2017 at 5 pm
s p e c i a l g u e s t : CHRISTIAN HARTARD (Urgroßneffe 4. Grades von Frank Hardart)
"Once I arranged to do an exhibition in Vienna just because the café next door served such delicious poached eggs. It turned out that they only had them on weekends. Nevertheless, I went there every day. That was in November of 2014. In January of 2011, New York was ice-cold and covered in snow. The biting wind that raced around the corners there was unbearable, and we took refuge in cafés. Sometimes I still dream of living above a jazz bar in New York, when I do, I open the window and listen to the cars driving on the Mittlerer Ring."
Mixed-media artist Gabi Blum creates hypnotic spaces of association – spaces which can often be entered. Figures that are embodied by the artist herself or others, move and act within these spaces. Sometimes viewers are directly involved, and the boundary between viewer and actor is suspended. Gabi Blum plays with our collective memory of pop-cultural images and with our expectations. These expectations are not fulfilled or are fulfilled in a different way: Pictures turn out to be live presentations of intimate tableaux vivants, distance is transformed into proximity, high culture into the trivial, fiction into reality - and vice versa.
Text: Bernhart Schwenk Translation: Sean Kenney