Exhibition: Independent 2023

Bureau is pleased to present a dual show of Erica Baum and Julia Rommel. In their respective photography and painting practices we see a long-shared attention to texture and folding, to the fortuitous information hidden between pages, layers, or along a side. Composing images that may often be read as concrete poetry,  Erica Baum has spent the past 30 years working with printed materials and the fragments of language and image found therein. Baum debuts selected work from her new series Fabrications, which mines the pages of old sewing magazines, looking at the encyclopedic universe of DIY craft, fashion and  home projects aimed at the domestic housewife. The vertical fan of pages – as with her celebrated Naked Eye series – supports a structural organizing principle to these images, which are at turns elegant, playful, and surprising. There is a structural rigor, too, to Julia Rommel’s paintings, where complex surfaces reveal layers of smoothing, folding and stapling, indexing the artist’s process and decision-making. These new paintings offer subtle color juxtapositions and bold, varied application. In some works, the central color-field barely reaches the perimeter of the composition, displaying the bars of color from previously stretched edges. In others, deep creases create sharply edged pinstripes which organize bands of color gradation, or add a topographical ridge over which sweeps of color move and cascade.

A conversation between the two artists, made on the occasion of the fair, is available to read here.