As most exhibitions do, this one starts with a story. At first glance, it’s easy to think that Vern Blosum’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, curated by Lionel Bouvier, is not an uncommon one. In the archaeological dig of the past it seems for each new young artist, there’s a rediscovered counterpart; the resurrection of figure forgotten by history, who for all intensive purposes may be forgotten just as quickly again. When you read a bit deeper, Blosum’s story comes with its fair share of intrigue, deception, and subversion—a young artist decides to play the game of the then-nascent movement of pop art and finds brief success. Leo Castelli sells the work, not knowing Blosum’s true identity. After mounting skepticism, Alfred H. Barr (a figure, who like most in art history, seem so foreign to our current landscape that they are almost a fiction themselves) begins a quasi-witch hunt, which led him to eventually find that there was no birth record in Blosum’s “birth state” of Colorado. The discovery of his lack of identity led to the physical (and perhaps equally ideological) removal of his painting from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
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