Brickline – A British Wall Frieze

spatial installation, digital print on self-adhesive film, Hubert Blanz, 2016

A BRITISH WALL FRIEZE

Andreas Krištof

Hubert Blanz’s work is defined by its focus on structures and patterns, often by tracing urban systems and architectures. His photography takes actual situations as its starting-point but only in order to use them as set pieces in creating new image patterns.

In the work developed for the ACF he installs a visual volume of photos of typical London property or garden walls. Resembling a wall ornament, this winds its way through the space, reminiscent of a panorama portrait that begins with the ACF in Kensington and continues through all of the London boroughs. It is both a positioning and an abstract image structure at the same time.

Andreas Krištof on the exhibition Out of the Box, Austrian Cultural Forum London, 2016

THE HOUSE OF SANTA CLAUS

Simone Christl

In the exhibition Das Haus vom Nikolaus [The House of Santa Claus], the Reinthaler Gallery presents an excerpt from Hubert Blanz's extensive series of works entitled Homeseekers. As in many of the artist's other works, spatial structures, special architectural situations and urban motifs are the starting point and theme. The basis for this project can be found in the photographic recording of London's facades and walls. Blanz took over 2,600 photos in all boroughs of Greater London, reworked them and then partially assembled them in a collage-like manner and restaged them.

Hubert Blanz is interested in reduced form. He omits details and objectifies his photos. It is striking that no people and as little of the surroundings as possible are depicted. In this way, he achieves his deliberately ‘scenic, naive and perspective-less‘ view.

In his two-dimensional and abstract representation of windowless and doorless house facades, he therefore deliberately refers to the children's drawing game ‘This is the house of Santa Claus’, in which a simple house is drawn at the same time as the eight spoken syllables

within a line.

Blanz is a collector of motifs. In addition to a slight documentary character, his work includes the intention to evoke and allow new contexts of meaning.

We find the same approach in Blanz's depictions of window and light structures from Chicago: Urban Codes. Here, too, the repetition of similar motifs, photographed from different angles in as two-dimensional a manner as possible, emphasises their importance.

In the exhibition, Hubert Blanz shows details from the three-part image collage Homeseekers – A City from Behind, a 9-metre-wide cityscape created between 2012 and 2016. Each photo or image contains multi-layered possibilities of perception and is intended to be read in this way.

An important aspect of Hubert Blanz's works is the presentation of socially critical questions and historical contexts: the ‘backyard view‘ is more interesting than the magnificent view of a building. Houses are deliberately viewed from behind (The City from Behind) – with their windowless, doorless and unadorned facades.

The artist emphasises his fascination with the architectural peculiarity of these simple brickfronted houses, which increasingly replaced wooden buildings after the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Their appearance was also significantly influenced by the window tax of 1696 and the ‘tax on light and air‘ of 1746, both of which were only abolished in the mid-19th century and during whose long period of validity social differences became clearly visible.

In Brickline 1250 – A British Wall Frieze, Blanz creates a continuous band from an almost endless composition of brick garden and property walls, which is glued directly onto the wall and runs through the gallery. This scanning of the space while viewing it is reminiscent of the long rambles through the cities that Blanz takes as his theme. Walking around and circling London is reflected in the arrangement of the 12.5-metre-long room installation.

In Brickline we once again find the systematic juxtaposition of a similar motif. Here, too, recognisability takes a back seat. More important is the search for new creative possibilities and contexts of meaning. The erection of walls is reminiscent of current world events, as is the title Homeseekers.

While researching in London, Blanz was struck by the many property listings from estate agents. With the title Homeseekers, which is part of the name of a London estate agency, he refers to their advertisements – illustrating the hopeless search for accommodation in a precarious housing market situation, which is also increasingly being felt in Vienna.

Simone Christl on the solo exhibition Das Haus vom Nikolaus, Galerie Reinthaler, Vienna, 2016

Translated with DeepL.com