Residing in Negative Space: The Art and Life Strategies of Marion Baruch

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The short essay presents the main issues surrounding the works and professional career of Marion Baruch. It investigates the concept of negative space and its significance in the artist’s creations. The central argument is that negative space serves as both a life strategy and an artistic research method in Baruch’s body of work. Baruch’s career follows a quintessentially atypical path for a woman artist from Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Her artworks revolve around a dual exploration of negative space. On one hand, they engage with negative space as a way of perceiving the world from the perspective of the thin line that delineates the boundaries between space and bodies. On the other hand, negative space represents a conceptual negation or the definition by negation of all living phenomena. This focus provides an opportunity to ref lect on the aestheticisation of capitalist markets in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.