About

Most of the time, they look you straight in the eyes. Sometimes, they appear as if they were melancholically dreamy. Lost in thought. They gaze off into the distance. This is not meant to be the people we encounter daily on the train, but rather the people on the canvases of the Munich artist Alex Blume. They seem like protagonists from our everyday life. Familiar strangers.

When you stand in front of one of Blume’s paintings, you immediately make eye contact with these people. There is the Man with pearl necklace. He wears a light long-sleeved shirt, and from his collar a white pearl necklace peeks out. There is a woman, resting her chin on her hand. She wears a floral dress; she is the Woman with floral pattern dress. Both the black man with the pearl necklace and the blonde woman in the flowery dress look directly at us. Then there are the others. They gaze into the distance, appearing lost in thought or dreamy. Just like the young man in the painting titled Dreaming in a Floral Sweater.

Speaking of floral—the floral elements run through Alex Blume’s work and even appear again in his artist name. This may well be a coincidence and a purely aesthetic decision, but it fits so well, because the people Alex Blume paints all carry a certain fragility within them. This is exactly what makes the beauty of the paintings and the grace of the portrayed people.

Surrounding this, Blume’s paintings are rather simple and calm. “I want to bring the important into focus, to direct the attention on the person,” he says. He often reflects on everyday situations, drawing inspiration from them every now and then, observing his surroundings. But who are the people in Alex Blume’s work? “The people come from photos and images that I find on the internet and that speak to me directly. I actively search for them. Sometimes on Pinterest, sometimes on Instagram, sometimes they are lookbooks. I also paint other artists from various fields whose work inspires me, most recently the Peruvian painter Shirley Villavicencio Pizango. However, the picture or the person must always evoke a coherent feeling in me. It can be profound, but also totally banal,” says Blume.

Simple or profound—our everyday life can be either one or the other. Both spark creative ideas in people, or they simply become artists themselves. This is a fair summary of Alex Blume’s career. He works as a communication designer and luckily eventually realized, “In design everything must be perfect, every pixel must be just right. In the long run, that wasn’t for me.” He began painting alongside his job. Step by step, he developed his style, experimented, and even ventured down new paths. He played around with brushstrokes and engaged in a creative exchange with his partner Monika Morito, who is an artist herself.

Blume’s brushwork is quick, rough, sometimes even harsh. The clothing of the subjects, however, is rendered in a particularly playful and affectionate way. There, a recurring pattern can be found, or simply flowers; the brushstroke becomes more precise in these areas, following a set choreography. The faces, on the other hand, have different shades, resembling a patchwork quilt when you look closely at the painting. Yet these varying hues, strokes, and textures form a completely harmonious face when you step back. “When you meet a person, you form an image of them. But you only get a sense of the depth of the person upon a second glance,” says Blume. The same applies to the way he creates the subjects with his painting technique and how they appear on the canvas. It’s as if you were looking down from an airplane: many fields of color and dabs together create a landscape.

If one could open up people, one would find landscapes. This is what the French filmmaker Agnès Varda once said. Alex Blume’s portraits fit this quote. He reveals the landscapes that people carry within them. Every person is a landscape with a history. That history is written on their face. One only has to look closely to see it. On Blume’s oil and acrylic paintings, we encounter them—these human landscapes—very tenderly and quietly.