Anna & Bernhard Blume: Metaphysics Is Men’s Work II

About the Exhibition

Anna & Bernhard Blume, a husband and wife team, have been creating artworks collaboratively since the 1970s.  Often using themselves as the protagonists, the Blumes have produced numerous suites of staged photographs that create ambiguous narratives.  Informed by conventional German middle-class values, the Blumes are inspired by cultural stereotypes and clichés such as the German romance with the forest.  Metaphysics Is Men’s Work II, a tableau of nine 98-by- 48½-inch black-and-white photographs, featured a couple moving through a mysterious wood.  Often marked by an ironic humor, the Blumes’ work questions and illuminates traditional gender roles and domesticity; their approach consistently evokes the strangeness, rather than the normalcy, of seemingly quotidian settings and objects.