http://www.huliq.com/45734/exhibiting-collections-barbara-bloom
Exhibiting Collections Of Barbara Bloom
In a world saturated with images, American artist Barbara Bloom makes art that examines the nature of looking. Internationally known for her meticulously crafted installations that combine newly made and appropriated objects and pictures, Bloom challenges conventional perceptions about the meaning of art with wry commentary on the practice of collecting and the desire for possessions.
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As suggested by the title, this exhibition is comprised of—and is a meditation on—collections, gatherings of images, objects, and ideas, which, in a sense, constitute Bloom's autobiography. The exhibition is divided into eleven sections: Doubles, Innuendo, Belief, Blushing, Broken, Framing, Charms, Naming, Songs, Stand Ins, and Reading In. Within these groupings, Bloom engages the viewer in a dialogue on how we construct and are constructed by visual culture. Among the many improbable objects that the artist has made or found are a Playboy magazine in Braille, postage stamps featuring the works of contemporary artists, a chair upholstered with fabric bearing the artist's dental X-rays, a pornographic image printed on a grain of rice, ceramic bowls that have been broken and repaired with gold, and a complete set of Vladimir Nabokov's writings, with all the book covers redesigned by Bloom herself.
Barbara Bloom was born in Los Angeles in 1951; she studied at Bennington College, and with John Baldessari and Robert Irwin at the California Institute of the Arts. For many years she lived and worked in Amsterdam and Berlin. She has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the MAK, Vienna; the Parrish Art Museum, Southhampton, New York; and other international venues, including the Venice Biennale (1988) and documenta X, Kassel, Germany (1997). She is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute. She currently lives and works in New York City. -- www.salvador-dali.org