September 12, 2023
THE DESIGN LIBRARY LONDON HAS EXPANDED!
April 18, 2023
Design Library Artist-in-Residence Barbara Bloom Opens in Cologne
March 30, 2023
Our Giorgio Taroni
January 1, 2023
New Year 2023
December 6, 2022
The Design Library Announces Artist-In-Residence
January 1, 2022
New Year 2022
August 4, 2021
The Design Library Acquires the Howard Asher Archive
July 21, 2020
KosmosNow!™ is Launched
July 6, 2020
THE DESIGN LIBRARY LONDON HAS LANDED
June 16, 2020
Design Library Post Covid Reopening Procedures
April 23, 2020
COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for WHO
March 17, 2020
Virtual Options From The Design Library
February 11, 2020
The Design Library Acquires the Rue Royale Collection
June 11, 2019
Alexa Chung at the MET Ball
March 26, 2019
The Design Library Announces Arrival of the Spay-Lehr Collection
June 1, 2018
The Design Library Opens New Contemporary Wing
May 1, 2017
THE DESIGN LIBRARY LAUNCHES SATELLITE™ --THE OPEN ACCESS COLLECTION OF KOSMOS
March 14, 2017
AFRICAN COLLECTION LANDED BY THE DESIGN LIBRARY
March 7, 2017
Discussion & Book Signing Held at Boston Design Center
December 15, 2016
Patterns: Inside the Design Library Launched in London
December 7, 2016
Patternbank Book of the Month
November 14, 2016
Creative Review: Where Do You Look For Inspiration?
November 3, 2016
Patterns Celebrated at Design Within Reach
November 1, 2016
PATTERNS Flies First Class on BA
October 19, 2016
Panel & Launch Party at Beacon Hill Showroom, D&D Building NYC
October 18, 2016
The Wall Street Journal Identifies "Design Books You’ll Want to Cut Up and Frame"
October 14, 2016
Quintessence Visits the Design Library
October 10, 2016
Publisher's Weekly "Top 10" Fall 2016 Adult Announcements: Art, Architecture & Photography
October 3, 2016
PATTERNS: Inside the Design Library Published
September 29, 2016
These Patterns Aren't Just Beautiful, They're Subconsciously Shaping Your Decisions Every Day
September 27, 2016
Where Do Patterns Come From? Fast Company Answers: The Design Library
September 26, 2016
1stdibs: Required Reading
September 12, 2016
Wallpaper* Style Findings: Patterns
August 19, 2016
Dwell Magazine: The Design Library is New York's True Textile Mecca
January 20, 2016
18th Century Paper Impressions Landed
January 20, 2016
Hodge Sellers Portfolio Archive Acquired
January 20, 2016
Girardet Freres Archive
June 9, 2015
Design Library London Expands
February 27, 2014
The Design Library Acquires Giorgio Taroni Archive
October 10, 2013
Abraham Paper Impression Collection
October 10, 2013
Giorgio Correggiari Archive
September 4, 2013
Design Library Featured in The Wall Street Journal Magazine Fall Fashion Issue
May 7, 2013
Chantal Geskoff & Michelle Berthet Studio Collections
May 7, 2013
Francesco Ortenzi Studio Collection
January 2, 2013
Cheney Brothers Collection
September 13, 2010
Bianchini-Férier Archive

THE DESIGN
LIBRARY

Design Library Artist-in-Residence Barbara Bloom Opens in Cologne

Barbara Bloom

... the whole grand pattern of human endeavor

31 March – 30 May, 2023

Galerie Gisela Capitain is pleased to announce Barbara Bloom’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, for which she has created a body of work that frames, highlights, spotlights Pattern.

For decades Barbara Bloom’s works have shown an underlying interest in decor – the grammar of presentation and display that structures meaning. Her genteel atmospherics are a form of conceptual interior decoration. In a time indebted to the strategies of rapid-fire technological communication, what could be more perverse than to surprise the eye, and slow things down, not with spectacle, but with an assemblage of minute details so understatedly controlled?

Bloom’s work carries the fragrance of ideas; they tease specific, often unnamable “qualities of attention” into visibility. It isn’t the objects themselves that are paramount, but how they manage to elicit a quality of attentiveness that we bestow upon them, thus highlighting that objects have agency.

Over time, Bloom has developed a working method of zeroing in on subjects, slowly researching, savoring all kinds of detours, in a blend of scholarship and pure hunch. Themes overlap and echo from one exhibition to the next. Though intentionally disparate in form, her exhibitions have conceptual threads running through. The subjects of framing and patterning have appeared in previous works, but have now been given center stage.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote of
... the selective and harmonious intensification of the loose patterns of chance and destiny, character and action, thought and emotion, existing in the reality of human life. ... Without such pattern one could feel that the whole of life seemed like a piece of filmmaking where heedless extras knew nothing of the picture in which they were taking part.

Every rich and varied moment of life offers something to observe and cherish. But one must find some means or method by which to uncover a pattern in the complex diversity of what is perceived. Without such a pattern, all experience would swim before one’s eyes, would dissolve into an unceasing, senseless series, a concatenation of the unconnected. The recognition of pattern combats the anxiety engendered by a sense that the world lacks an intrinsic order.

In these new works patterns seem to emanate from photographs and art historical imagery. Pattern frames and ornaments, as footnotes or commentary. Patterns are found slipping from the surface, receding into the background, or willing themselves off of the two-dimensional plane and into the room.

Barbara Bloom is the 2022-23 Artist-in-Residence at The Design Library, New York. She has found inspiration in the free rein they offered her to swim in the vast pool of the archive’s millions of surface patterns – adornment dating from centuries ago to the present.

**Title from Joan Didion, The White Album