Julia Blum's surrealist creations bridge visual traditions and aesthetic histories in unprecedented ways to create new dialogues on artistic process and personal identity.
Drawing from her subconscious to create both the content and the format of her works, Blum translates her experiences through the emotion of the pieces, rather than visual recreations of events. "My work is my language and it's personal," she offers as an explanation for the origins of her alien-like subjects. These figures appear in a range of distortions and proportions, acting as stand-ins for humans, yet remaining intentionally ambiguous in their race and gender so as to retain universal appeal/repulsion for their viewers. The works illustrate the "material and ideological dramas of the human condition, such as: life, death, sexuality, abjection, and love… [Inherently, they are] a study of our genus: the differences that set us apart from one another and the behaviors that make us all one and the same."
Born in Biarritz, France, Julia Blum has spent time in Ghana, and now resides and shows her work in Philadelphia.
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