Interstices: Знакомство с коллекцией Ben Uri , куратор Рене Гимпель

This close-up photograph of a billboard hoarding is one of a series of works featuring torn posters, graffiti and other urban ephemera, which Bohm captured after observing, then waiting (sometimes months) for her subject to ‘mature’. The resulting partly eroded and weather-ravaged image resembles, in its distressed condition, a strongly coloured and multi-layered collage. Although the original meaning is lost, the possibilities are multiplied as each fragment hints at past dramatic events. The inclusion, for example, of a head thrown back in agony (lower left) from Picasso’s Guernica (1937), expressing the artist’s horror at the bombing of the Basque town by Franco’s German allies during the Spanish Civil War, has been juxtaposed with the face of a woman wearing a soldier’s helmet (upper right). Both are disturbing intimations of conflict, somewhat offset by fragments of sky and landscape, seemingly offering glimpses of freedom. The torn poster is part of a powerful group of works which represent, as Monica Bohm-Duchen has commented, ‘a palimpsest of contemporary western culture which forcefully conveys its fickleness’.