[Ödipale Komplikationen?]
Childhood is the stage of life when we play most freely, without preconceived ideas, moved only by curiosity and fun. But it is also in those years when most of our neuroses are formed. According to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, many of them are explained by the Oedipus complex, which encom-passes ambivalent feelings of attraction and hostility towards our parents.
This sequence of photos, titled Aufstehen (to get up in German), belongs to the series Oedipal Complications? and was presented by the pair of artists Anna and Bernhard Blume in 1978. In it, Bernhard and his 70-year-old mother, who had been a widow for two decades, do some exercises together to keep fit. This is an activity that, in Bernhard’s words, ends up opening a path to reunion. Gestures to loosen the joints also serve to overcome emotional rigidity and express repressed feelings. On the same sofa where the artist’s father used to take his nap, mother and son indulge in a playful and unprejudiced exploration of their movements and affections, without fear or shame, free of complications, oedipal or otherwise.
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Born in Bork, Westphalia, in 1936 and passing away in 2020, Anna Blume studied Art and was a high school teacher in Cologne until the 1990s. Bernhard Blume, born in 1937 in Dortmund and passing away in 2011, began his career as a painter of theater and cinema posters. Between 1960 and 1965, they studied together at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Subsequently, Bernhard studied Philosophy at the University of Cologne and worked as a professor of Free Art and Visual Communication at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. Anna and Bernhard married in 1966 and had two children. By the end of the 1970s, an intense artistic collaboration was established between them.
Their work was recognized in numerous exhibitions in their country and abroad, including several at the documenta in Kassel, at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago, at the Kunsthalle Basel, or recently at the collective exhibition À partir d’elle at Le Bal in Paris. Their work is part of several museum collections. In their final years, before passing away in 2020, Anna Blume worked as a curator of their collected works at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the Kolumba in Cologne.
16–ANNA & BERNHARD BLUME [ÖDIPALE KOMPLIKATIONEN?]
OUTDOOR INSTALLATION
VENUE: EREAGA HONDARTZA/PLAYA II
Collaborator:
