Featured Artist: Christian Blau

Christian Blau is a Germany based artist, working in the fields of material painting, photography, sound objects and installations. Blau’s work is often an ironic and critical comment on our media-influenced society and pop culture. Images, techniques and text overlap and challenge the viewer not to trust their first impression. Christian Blau is interested in multiple layers, which could mean material layers like sand, hessian or paint.

At the same time, those layers could be found, or self-made photographic images; they are represented by text and the multiple meanings those texts can provoke. Overall, Blau is more interested in the sculptural aspect of a work rather than thinking of paintings. His older works like “Over Exposure” (shown in the travelling exhibition, Marilyn, the life of a legend), the workblock‚ TalkTalk‚ Omertà were executed as photo exposures on sand surfaces, produced in his studio darkroom. As this technique only supports black and white, Blau works today with industrial printing techniques that provide colour and even high-quality image printing, still on his beloved material surfaces.

His sound objects are sculptures that interact with the viewer who pushes the button. In the work, Warlitzer, shown in the exhibition ‘Emergency Room’, at PS 1, New York, 2007, Blau produced a sound sample about war news every day, that could be recorded with the sculpture and then played again. So here the sculpture functioned as a container for changing samples. Not only because of his starting point as a musician, Blau likes to be free in the choice of techniques. But he is also very open to a humorous approach to the often disturbing themes oft he presents.

more. www.christian-blau.de