Erica Baum

It is our great pleasure to present the solo exhibition A Method of a Cloak by 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 texts and images. With her reflected, nonchalant use of strategies akin to the work of the Pictures Generation, conceptual art, and minimalism, Erica Baum has developed a unique and truly authentic visual language. For two decades now, 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" its visual, haptic and thematic qualities.

And yet, her works are still "photographic" in a very specific fashion: alongside the fleeting and ephemeral quality of the constant flow of images on our displays, Erica Baum places an object-like presence and a precise interest in the material context of photography.

She always develops her series of pictures in direct close-ups, focused on surprising details with a shallow depth of field. With this specific, conceptual approach, she develops a poetic power. Both a peep box and magnifying glass at the same time, indexically precise and at the same time abstract and transtemporal like a collage, fragmentary and yet possessing a narrative power; seemingly everyday, trivial, and at the same time charged.

The space between text and visual layer combine, open for ever new interpretations. Erica Baum’s pictures are emotional in a special sense, they have a soul and demand most careful attention; they question and confirm in very fundamental ways – with text, image, writing, message, significance, and use – an understanding of the essence of our culture.

A Method of a Cloak is Erica Baum’s first solo exhibition with Klemm's, presenting her current series Patterns, photographs taken from guidelines and booklets made for the home tailor. Drawing a line between the "dictate" of fashion and the language of sewing patterns, Baum lets the words resonate on their own, freed from the canvas of a sentence.

Visual information is here quite literally layered, the signs and lines, word fragments and figures on the various sides appear over and next to one another. On a yellow-patinaed foundation and against a backdrop of faded blues, reds, and blacks, a rhythmic play of instructions, a multilingual fashion vocabulary, and freely hovering body silhouettes develops. Somewhere between technical drawing, geometric diagrams, and a minimalist sketch book.

Striking in Patterns is the division into larger formats and smaller, almost serialistic images. The latter, with their reduced drawing and textual components, set the tone for the abstract visual language and the concentrated rhythm of the work group. The outlines of the figures thus seem all the more remarkable in the visual space of the larger, colorfully subtly composed tableaus. With their posture, gestures, and facial expressions, these de-humanized mannequins and strangely inanimate subjects are confident and entirely autonomous. Framed by patterns and sewing instructions that are only partly visible, this results in a different form of legibility.

Erica Baum inscribes her current images with a charming lightness and weightlessness, which already on second glance suggests a deeper, critical interest: in the alienation of work processes and the world of commodities, the role of the invisible labor force and the situations in the sweatshops of global competition take to the stage alongside questions of gender stereotypes, control, and prevalent power relations. Baum succeeds in making various layers of this critical context palpable, and thus trusting the visual finesse and openness of her images. Creating a stark contrast with the primary function of those manuals, which were actually aimed at “imprisoning” the body through arrangements, lines and cuts, they are now transcended into vessels for a much wider conversation. While the poetic quality known from earlier series is very much in play, Erica Baum's Patterns bring to mind the political undertones palpable below the surface of the images.

Erica Baum (born in New York, 1961) received a BA in anthropology from Barnard in 1984 and an MFA from Yale University in 1994. Recent museum exhibitions include Face à face, frac île-de-france, Campus de Villetaneuse; Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY ; 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 University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.