Erica Baum

Off the Hook

Off The Hook is Erica Baum’s second solo exhibition with KLEMM‘S, presenting her new body of works Fabrications. In this series the artist develops her combinatorial vocabulary further – dissecting interesting and surprising subtleties from sewing and craft magazines, which emulate an American idyll of domesticity, and creating new text-image-writing arrangements with subtle narrative approaches that soon dissolve airily into the speculative.

She allows viewers to look between the pages, no longer recognizable as such, of a bygone pop culture, directs the focus onto material qualities and thus interweaves the world of the depictable and the abstract, thus removing the visual information from its original intention.

The title of the series is both a reference to the source material and to the production of the objects created; a fabrication executed by the artist with precise accuracy and technical virtuosity, humorously and repeatedly reformulated in a rhythmic sequence of combinations, realized with palpable curiosity for the resulting compositions. Baum thus generates new contexts, new meanings and insights, whose artistically created semantic system refers to circular networks of our information and material transfer.

Baum’s Fabrications series is also the subject of her recently published, limited edition Artist Book with Three Star Books, Paris. Just like the nature of her framed works, the structure of the book echoes the principle of layering, revealing the finely glazed undertones of humor and multi-referentiality inherent in all of Baum’s works in the deliberate use of different sizes, the exposure of the paper’s qualities and the gridding of the print patterns. In different visual chapters, reflected in both the publication and the exhibition design, viewers can trace the lineage back to the culturally embedded printed matter via these rhythmic textures.

Erica Baum‘s images are emotional in a special sense – they have a soul and demand the utmost attention. They question and confirm in a very fundamental way: Text, image, writing – their message, meaning and use.