A book inspired by Bloom’s installation at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Kunstverein München, and the Endlichkeit der Freiheit exhibition in post-wall Berlin. The title, Never Odd or Even, is a palindrome, which parallels the artist’s investigation into the workings of symmetry and order that occurs in nature (as with butterflies and twins) and in culture (the architecture of Chinese palaces, formal gardens, Palladio, and the Nazi structures of Albert Speer). Exploring both the beauty and the horror of the ordering principles of symmetry, Never Odd or Even contains some of Bloom’s most memorable discoveries (such as a photo of identical twins showing Johnny Carson their butterfly collection). A must for Nabokov fans, whose lepidopterist spirit is conjured throughout. Presented in the form of leaves which the reader must cut apart with a knife.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibitions Pictures of the Real World (In Real Time) curated by Robert Nickas at The Consortium, Dijon; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York;  Le Capitou, Fréjus; Städtische Galerie, Göppigen; Galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milano, presenting On Kawara’s Date paintings in relation to various contemporary photographs.

Featuring the following artists; Dan Graham, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Douglas Huebler, Lee Friedlander, Larry Clark, William Eggleston, Nan Goldin, Peter Hujar, Jan Groover, Peter Campus, James Welling, Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Barbara Bloom, Louise Lawler, Sam Samore, John Coplans, Barbara Ess, Andres Serrano, David Robbins, Jeanne Dunning, Zoe Leonard, Félix González-Torres, Philip-Lorca Di Corcia, Charles Ray, Robert Barry, Danny Lyon.

This volume assesses a wonderful body of work that encompasses installations, films, artist’s books and specimens from the artist’s vast archives of ephemera. Like Marcel Broodthaers and Susan Hiller, Bloom has a creative attraction toward taxonomy and museology: the installation “Greed” (1988), for instance, is comprised of a chair, an empty frame and a photograph of a museum gallery with a seated guard. An example of one of her own collections is a complete set of Vladimir Nabokov’s writings for which Bloom redesigned all of the book covers, referring both to herself and Nabokov as collectors (he obsessively collected editions of his own books) and in the process interposing herself as artist. In some cases, Bloom revisits previous installations to add new elements, resisting and upsetting the orderliness of a conventional artistic chronology. The Collections of Barbara Bloom includes essays by Dave Hickey and Susan Tallman and expands a project developed as part of Bloom’s Wexner Art Center Residency Award in 1998.

Over the past four decades, Barbara Bloom (American, born 1951) has engaged in a nonceptual practice centered on photography and intricate image-based installations featuring diverse elements such as sculptures, found objects, and film stills.

Bloom rarely presents a singular image or object, but concerns herself with the relationships between objects and images, and the meanings implicit in their placement and combination. Bloom’s artwork uses beauty as a premise for investigating illusion, fragility, and transience.