Homeseekers

c-print on dibond, Hubert Blanz, 2012-2016

Brief description

In the three-part digital collage Homeseekers - A City from Behind, created between 2012 and 2016, Hubert Blanz draws attention to the social differences in London. Over a period of more than three months, he documented all the brick façades, most of which have no doors or windows. This architectural austerity can be traced back to the window tax introduced in 1696 and the ‘tax on light and air’ implemented in 1746. Although both taxes were suspended by the middle of the 19th century, the brick walls are not only an unmistakable sign for social differences but to this day still shape the cityscape of the British metropolis. The title Homeseekers reflects the complex and often precarious housing situation in London, highlighting the social challenges facing the city.

THE HOUSE OF SANTA CLAUS

Simone Christl

In the exhibition Das Haus vom Nikolaus [The House of Santa Claus], the Reinthaler Gallery presents an excerpt from Hubert Blanz's extensive series of works entitled Homeseekers. As in many of the artist's other works, spatial structures, special architectural situations and urban motifs are the starting point and theme. The basis for this project can be found in the photographic recording of London's facades and walls. Blanz took over 2,600 photos in all boroughs of Greater London, reworked them and then partially assembled them in a collage-like manner and restaged them.

Hubert Blanz is interested in reduced form. He omits details and objectifies his photos. It is striking that no people and as little of the surroundings as possible are depicted. In this way, he achieves his deliberately ‘scenic, naive and perspective-less‘ view.

In his two-dimensional and abstract representation of windowless and doorless house facades, he therefore deliberately refers to the children's drawing game ‘This is the house of Santa Claus’, in which a simple house is drawn at the same time as the eight spoken syllables

within a line.

Blanz is a collector of motifs. In addition to a slight documentary character, his work includes the intention to evoke and allow new contexts of meaning.

We find the same approach in Blanz's depictions of window and light structures from Chicago: Urban Codes. Here, too, the repetition of similar motifs, photographed from different angles in as two-dimensional a manner as possible, emphasises their importance.

In the exhibition, Hubert Blanz shows details from the three-part image collage Homeseekers – A City from Behind, a 9-metre-wide cityscape created between 2012 and 2016. Each photo or image contains multi-layered possibilities of perception and is intended to be read in this way.

An important aspect of Hubert Blanz's works is the presentation of socially critical questions and historical contexts: the ‘backyard view‘ is more interesting than the magnificent view of a building. Houses are deliberately viewed from behind (The City from Behind) – with their windowless, doorless and unadorned facades.

The artist emphasises his fascination with the architectural peculiarity of these simple brickfronted houses, which increasingly replaced wooden buildings after the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Their appearance was also significantly influenced by the window tax of 1696 and the ‘tax on light and air‘ of 1746, both of which were only abolished in the mid-19th century and during whose long period of validity social differences became clearly visible.

In Brickline 1250 – A British Wall Frieze, Blanz creates a continuous band from an almost endless composition of brick garden and property walls, which is glued directly onto the wall and runs through the gallery. This scanning of the space while viewing it is reminiscent of the long rambles through the cities that Blanz takes as his theme. Walking around and circling London is reflected in the arrangement of the 12.5-metre-long room installation.

In Brickline we once again find the systematic juxtaposition of a similar motif. Here, too, recognisability takes a back seat. More important is the search for new creative possibilities and contexts of meaning. The erection of walls is reminiscent of current world events, as is the title Homeseekers.

While researching in London, Blanz was struck by the many property listings from estate agents. With the title Homeseekers, which is part of the name of a London estate agency, he refers to their advertisements – illustrating the hopeless search for accommodation in a precarious housing market situation, which is also increasingly being felt in Vienna.

Simone Christl on the solo exhibition Das Haus vom Nikolaus, Galerie Reinthaler, Vienna, 2016

Translated with DeepL.com

Homeseekers – London

Barabara Egger

The creative inquiry undertaken by Hubert Blanz presents a form of research in which he explores urban and digital networks by choosing alternative methods than those offered by the social sciences. His approach is nonetheless rigorous and results in a systematic inquiry. It emphasizes the role of the imaginative intellect by questioning, creating and visually constructing knowledge that is not only new but also has the capacity to transform our perspectives on, and understanding of, urban issues. Urban infrastructures, spatial grids and geographical networks are Hubert Blanz’s domain of research. His methodological approach to these themes involves the formulation of a hypothesis based on his first impressions of a city, research into various selective aspects of the topic on a theoretical basis followed by a practical exploration.

He has applied this approach throughout his artistic practice focussing on megacities, culminating in his series Homeseekers created during his residency in London in 2012. The starting point for this project, upon Blanz’ arrival in London in early 2012, was his fascination with the brick buildings and terrace houses that are so characteristic of the British capital. This is an interest he shares with many visitors to London, for whom both the low skyline and rows of terraced houses are a curiosity. Blanz was particularly struck by the general absence of windows or other decorative elements on many end-of-terrace and rear facades. Occasionally he found some with bricked-up window spaces, however, most featured hermetically closed brick walls.

This peculiarity of the dominant residential architectural style has inspired, in particularly non-Londoners, to artistic and scientific explorations. Both Hubert Blanz and the Austrian architect and Central St. Martin’s lecturer Günter Gassner have focused on these themes in their work.

Hubert Blanz’ interest in architecture stems from his studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and his photographic works primarily focus on architectural themes and concepts. In London his inquisitive nature and methodological approach led him to explore the greater London area on foot. In that survey he has taken more than 2500 images of individual houses and concluded in this process that those in the outer boroughs of London share this characteristic of a naked facade. In order to convey the abstractness and highlight the strangeness Blanz photographed the facades in a series of frontal, centred shots that present the building as a two-dimensional, lineal drawing. Background elements are kept to a minimum denying the houses their spatial qualities, reducing them yet again to a flat, two-dimensional pictorial image. This effect is reinforced by the vertical format of these small single images. Blanz inverts the traditional structure of the photographic image between foreground and background giving greater prominence to the empty street in front of the house than to the sky above. The history of this architectural style begins with the Great Fire of London in 1666 and the resulting switch from wood to brick buildings. Later the low cost of brick, the brick tax introduced in 1784, and in particular the window tax were significant social, cultural, and architectural forces in England and Scotland during the 18th and 19th centuries. The window tax was a property tax based on the number of windows in a house introduced in 1696 and repealed only in 1851. It was designed to impose tax relative to the prosperity of the taxpayer, with a variable tax for the number of windows. The term daylight robbery is thought to have originated from the window tax as it was described by some as a tax on light, that was also mentioned Harold Brighouse’s play Hobson’s Choice.

In his writings Hubert Blanz compares his photographs of houses to linear graphical representations and children’s drawings because of their flatness, linear quality and two-dimensionality. Specifically he refers to the house of Santa Claus, an old German drawing game for small children where they are taught to draw a house with a single line.

Another interpretation of these single images lies in the comparison with housing ads that populate newspapers and agency windows throughout London. Not only do they share a similar composition, but both refer to the need and desire for housing. The title Homeseekers reflects on the difficult and often precarious housing situation in the British capital, that is certainly also connected to the preference for low-rise brick townhouses.

Ultimately Blanz intends to mount all 2500 individual images together as part of an enormous collage that would represent London as the City from Behind. This is very much the culmination, and at the same time, the reconnection with the starting point of this project, the individual house facade. In taking individual images of houses’ rear sides and terrace endings Hubert Blanz investigated, approached and discovered London. With his collage he puts the single house impressions back together to form The City from Behind.

Barbara Egger on the solo exhibition Homeseekers, Austrian Cultural Forum London, 2013