MIRIAM BÖHM

Perception and space are the central themes of Miriam Böhm’s photography. The artist’s recent works build on the methodology developed in her earliest series; by repeatedly photographing a physical arrangement of paper or other simple materials and incorporating sections of those photographs into the original arrangement, Böhm constructs a still life that features itself as a subject. With their source materials nearly indiscernible, many of Böhm’s images approach complete abstraction, depicting impossible spaces lit by contradictory light sources. Through a combination of studio-based photography and natural motifs, Böhm brings her meticulous and perplexing image-making to the tradition of landscape photography.

By combining images of trees, lakes, and mountains in her camera’s frame, Böhm’s photographs suggest familiar vistas without resolving into traditional landscapes. Each image maintains a relationship to studio-arranged still life photography, while expanding on Böhm’s distinctively sculptural photographic practice.

In painting, André Gide sees the mise en abyme principle implemented in compositions in which a mirror reflects the space beyond the depicted scene, thus challenging the depiction’s boundaries as well as its perspective. As in literature, a mise en abyme in painting presupposes the existence of at least two compositional levels, which are interrelated by means of mirroring or their similarity to one another, and which reflect on the unity of the work in detail. Miriam Böhm’s photographs are likewise characterized by this kind of intricate interplay of different levels and elements. With the aid of repetitions, reflections and shifts, she places details within her compositions en abyme leading to the emergence of open, multiply ambiguous structures. (...) The composition thus contains numerous doublings that are not, however, exact repetitions, but slightly varied shifts and nuances of individual pictorial elements. (...) In Böhm’s photographs, the intermeshing of different pictorial levels in the mise en abyme creates breaks that rob the images of their spatiotemporal continuity and logic. (...) The overlapping levels cause breaks along the edges of the forms in such a way that they ultimately defy unequivocal definition with regard to their boundaries and their relationship to the background.

Excerpt from Of Abysses and Gaps - Nina Schallenberg, ex.cat. Miriam Böhm wie fast, 2016

Miriam Böhm (born 1972) lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Miriam Böhm had solo exhibitions at the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen, Germany and the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, USA.

Her works have been exhibited in group exhibitions at Kunstforum NRW, Düsseldorf, Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt; Kunstmuseum Bochum; Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin; DZ Bank Collection in Frankfurt (all Germany); Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, FL; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; Berkeley Museum, Berkeley, CA (all USA) and the Kumu Art Museum in Tallin, Estonia.

Böhm’s works are part of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, CA; des Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Berkley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkley, CA and the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Ludwigshafen, Germany and numerous distinguished private collections.