[Berlin, Germany]

Erica Baum's solo-exhibition A Method of Cloak in Berlin
March 6, 2020, 6:00 pm
at KLEMM'S

A METHOD OF A CLOAK | Erica Baum @ KLEMM’S
Ongoing MAR 6 – APR 18, 2020

Save the date: March 06, 2020 | 6 – 9pm, with Erica Baum

Fascinated by the printed word, concrete poetry and the beauty of language permeating our daily lives, the American artist Erica Baum could be best described as a “poet-photographer”. She has become internationally known for her photographic practice based on found sources of text and images. With her reflected, nonchalant use of strategies akin to the Pictures Generation, Conceptual Art and Minimalism, Erica Baum has developed a unique and truly authetic visual language. Since two decades her enigmatic close-ups of books, newspapers and other printed matter have been investigating the nature, traditions, and magic-spots of the photographic – steadily “re-materializing” it’s visual, haptical and contextual qualities.

A Method of a Cloak is Erica Baum’s first solo exhibition with KLEMM’S, presenting her current series Patterns – photographs spawning from the guidelines and booklets made for the home tailor. Drawing a line between the “dictate” of fashion and the language of sewing patterns, Baum is letting the mulit-lingual words resonate on their own, freed from the canvas of a sentence. In contrast with the primary function of those manuals, which were aimed at “controlling” the body through arrangements, lines and cuts, these collaged ‘photographs’ open the unexpected – while the poetic quality known from earlier series is strongly at play, Erica Baum’s Patterns bring to mind the political sub-tones, palpable below the surface of the images.

Erica Baum (b. 1961, New York) received her MFA from Yale University in 1994 and her BA in Anthropology from Barnard in 1984. Recent museum exhibitions include Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY ; Face à face, frac île‑de‑france, Campus de Villetaneuse; The Swindle: Art Between Seeing and Believing, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Lever le voile, Frac île-de-france, Paris; Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Kunsthalle Berlin and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Reconstructions: Recent Photographs and Video from the Met Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include A Long Dress, Bureau, New York; Naked Eye Nature Morte, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris; AAa:Quien, Erica Baum & Libby Rothfeld, Bureau, New York; The Following Information, Bureau, New York; Stanzas, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris. Selected biennials include; AGORA 4th Athens Biennale, Athens, 2013 and the 30th Bienal de São Paulo: The Imminence of Poetics, São Paulo, Brazil, 2012.
Her work is held in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; FRAC Ile de France, Paris; and the Yale Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.