Slægt, oil on canvas, 130 x 150 cm., 2005

With her Chronology of Bloom 06 exhibition Doris Bloom presents a series of new paintings marking the climax of many years of research into what she terms the geography of identity.

In these paintings Doris Bloom delves into Nordic identity that she herself became a part of after moving from apartheid South Africa to Denmark in 1976. Here the colour blue is dominant for the first time, capturing light and the high sky in what is described in the accompanying catalogue as "a subdued epic of the unity of cold and heat".

In her earlier work Bloom has often traced memory images positioning the individual in relation to the universal. She inevitably maintains a balance between absolute rawness and human survival, and unceasingly explores the various cultures we have coded into our very bodies.

Her autobiographical treatment veers clear of the sentimental in her work, reflecting as it does relationships between the fate of the individual and history in all its magnitude. This perspective comes to the fore clearly in a huge painting that scrolls out history into a monumental panorama.

From the performance at the opening in Galerie Asbæk

Here is Adam and Eve's expulsion from Paradise side by side with half-naked sun bathers, Napoleon, children's drawings, cars on the busy motorway, and more. All of them components in a dramatic landscape which merges different eras and places in tremendous turbulence focusing on the civilisation process itself, and revealing the fragility of the human being.

An exhibition with performance
To highlight that the exhibition represents a turning point for Bloom — a summing up, if you will, before new roads are taken — her exhibition at Gallery Asbæk will include a performance: dressed in her boarding school uniform she will literally get "under the skin" of a slaughtered cow.

The cow plays a central role in Bloom's personal mythology as well as being something concrete in Nordic culture, reflecting as it does the body and the organic as an alternative to systems and cultures. The artist meets the animal in its cycle from the grass in the fields until culminating as food.


Synchronic with Bloom's performance at 5 p.m. two window cleaners will start polishing the gallery's two huge windows, using rhythmic movements reminiscent of the brush strokes used to create her paintings.

The title Chronology of Bloom 06 is a reference both to James Joyce's note books Chronology, and to Doris Bloom's fictive namesake Leopold Bloom, the main character in Joyce's Ulysses, who leaves not just traces as he walks, but paints a picture of his whole life, step by step.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition is by Martin Zerland.