Gegenseitig (Reciprocal)

The artist duo Anna and Bernhard Blume trained as painters at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf Academy of Art) with the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, which led them to a photographic practice steeped in a tradition of performance art. They often used photography to document performed events, thereby generating a set of conceptual premises and concerns that differed from documentary, pictorial, or formal strategies. For over thirty years, the Blumes collaborated on a project that paired photography and performance in a critique of bourgeois life. They staged quotidian dramas that drew out the absurd in the everyday. Their wry and ironic works ridicule what the Blumes perceived as the petty preoccupations of middleclass existence. By portraying themselves as the central characters, as seen here, their works also investigate notions of identity.