Eberhard Blum.org | Graphic Work
Eberhard Blum’s graphic–conceptual œuvre comprises over four thousand works on paper in an array of formats, groupings, types, and techniques, only a fraction of which can be documented here. In black-and-white and color, these works include two-meter high graphite “paintings,” incidental miniatures, aleatory cycles, graphic scores, cut-outs, alphabets, numerals, symbols, and ink splotches. Whether rendered in fine pencil on a scrap of cardboard, dashed off with a full brush on salvaged packing material, or systematically composed and executed on rice, roll, or construction paper, on papyrus or handmade rag, each and all of them breathes with the immediacy of music-making and bears witness to his unwavering interest and inexhaustible delight in the phenomena at hand.
Like the music he performed, Blum's graphic work is concerned less with subject matter and content than with material, form, and process. Consequently, he neither gave the vast majority of his works titles nor divided them into thematic categories. Nonetheless, he did use a variety of tags and labels when referring to different currents in the flood of images he produced. Much of the present arrangement of his graphic–conceptual œuvre in chronological, technical, and æsthetic groupings has thus been based on his own informal classifications, while a number of additional characterizations have been introduced to better organize this presentation of his work. Many works exhibit the characteristics of more than one category, so that apparently related drawings have often been assigned to different categories.
Upon Blum’s death in 2013, the art historian Sabine Lange undertook the compilation of a comprehensive illustrated digitized catalogue of his artistic estate. The project’s successful completion, in December 2015, was made possible by Lange’s personal and professional commitment and the generous support of Andreas Rasspe-Weidenbusch.
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