Benjamin Rubloff When I was there

Annotation

When I was there is the recent book by the Berlin-based artist Benjamin Rubloff. The book is about the experience of the city; it explores how traces of personal and collective histories are embedded in the cityscape. The artist’s paintings–based on fragments of graffiti tags–suggest gestural abstraction, but are the result of a slow process that transcribes the marks of an anonymous graffiti writer. These tags, as ephemeral markers of place, are accompanied by writings that explore the poetics of change, transformation and remembrance. The book concludes with a photographic index of the places where the graffiti traces were found, and so grounds these abstractions in the concrete world of the city itself. The book includes an essay, Mapping Abstraction, by Duncan Ballantyne-Way