ANNA & BERNHARD BLUME

Anna and Bernhard Blume were a collaborative duo of German artists, best known for their large-scale, black and white photographs. Throughout their practice, they captured themselves dynamically engaging with objects in the world, resulting in humorous investigations into space, art history, and contemporary life. Anna was born Anna Helming in Bork, Germany and Bernhard was born in Dortmund, Germany, both in 1937. They went on to study at the Staatliche Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf from 1960 to 1965, where they met and were married in 1966. The Blumes have been collaborating since then in a “lifelong photo-novel” that involves staging themselves in scenes of German middle-class life gone frantically out of control. The absurd and humorous quality of the Blumes’ work stems largely from their original staging of scenarios that, rendered with the blur of motion, slyly undermine certainties about human reason and social order.