Anke Blaue
Anke Blaue brings to this, her first Barcelona exhibition, a strong orientation and a mastery remarkable in so young an artist. First a sculptor in Germany and Italy, she later carne to Barcelona, where she rnet Bruno Fonseca and through him discovered the tradition of Joaquín Torres-García, whose son. Augusto Torres, had been Fonseca's maestro. Blaue's work is solidly rooted in that Constructivist tradition: the collages presented here are her own interpretation of it. She sees a work of art as a construction in which independent elements -geometry, proportion (the golden section), shape, colour, tone and line- are composed as in a fugue. As important as construction in Blaue's plastic conception is materia, the character of the material -its flatness, its texture, even its history- and this is also a fertile source of inspiration. She found and cut the paper used in these works from stage sets discarded in the Barcelona's Paralelo theater district. Blaue has, in her folding screens, given this material a new theatrical expression, whereby playful rearrangements of the reversible sections, in various harmonies with the others, become a kind of mathematical game. Mindful of the dictum that all great art, whether figurative or not, is abstract, she also recalls the cautionary reminder to question when a theory helps and when it becomes an obstacle. Blaue's sensitivity to the tone and the unpremeditated gives her work a freshness that transcernds any rigid system.
Anna Ricart. 1996