Erica Baum @ Klemm’s showroom | Gallery Weekend Berlin 2021

On the occasion of Gallery Weekend 2021 we have curated a showroom presentation with works by artists of the gallery. We are delighted to start this first day with works by Erica Baum, from her series ‚Dog Ear‘.

(…) Erica’s Dog Ear, a book of photograph-poems, in which each poem is a meticulous reproduction of a dog-eared page of a mass-market paperback photographed to isolate the small, diagonally bisected squares or rectangles of text.(…) Some have dubbed Erica’s work “photo-poetics.” And as you’ll hear during the discussion, Erica favors that designation — appreciates being deemed a member of the poetry community.(…)

This is an extract from Poemtalk #125, you can listen (and watch) the full episode online at Jacket 2’s website.

Since the mid-1990s, Erica Baum has been coaxing a fragmented poetry from the unlikeliest places, quarantining found snippets of text that never aspired to great significance and dilating both their scale and their associative potential. (…) A second-wave wrangler of Pictures Generation insights, Baum aims to illuminate a covert, sometimes incriminating largesse in the discarded and to purposefully collapse together not only high and low, as we once called them, but visual and verbal, banal diagram and highfalutin abstraction, the Apollonian and the edgeless. (…)

Excerpt from Martin Herbert’s review of Erica Baum’s first solo exhibition „A Method of a Cloak“ at Klemm’s, for Art Agenda. You can access the full article here.

(…) What interests me are the juxtapositions and sense of history derived from the words themselves even without knowing everything. I want to give you a sense of a particular environment but not in its entirety.The view is oblique and re-contextualized. In this close up immersive situation the viewer can retain a level of awareness, just enough to inform but also to allow a different visual and semantic experience to take hold. (…)

Erica Baum’s artist statement on her series ‚Dog Ear‘ for the Posit Journal.

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 Pictures, Revisited, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; 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.