Einfühlung marks the debut solo exhibition of Werner Pellehn Blum at the Centro Cultural Ecuatoriano-Aleman, a fitting venue for the Ecuadorian artist of German descent. Formally trained as a writer, Pellehn Blum’s fine art practice developed from the desire to transition from the written to the visual form to create a new mode of expression. Having always written scripts for film and theater, the artist is currently endeavoring to reinterpret one medium, the written word, through the exploration of other, visual, mediums including painting and photography. 

With art historical influences stemming from Dutch still-life paintings to Belgian Surrealism to German Romanticism, Pellehn Blum creates an artistic universe that goes beyond solely portraying images – here the artist forges direct relationships with the viewer. Touching on themes that are at once deeply personal but also relatable on a universal scale, Pellehn Blum uses painting and photocollage to explore mourning the loss of a friendship, family histories of immigration, and nostalgia for cities once called home. In his works, Pellehn Blum looks to abstraction as a method to express writing through painting. Through the use of fragmentation, the artist translates a moment from lived reality into an abstraction, breaking down visual components into a nonlinear, nonnarrative manner that allows the viewer to actively engage with the works through the associations one makes as they walk through the show. 

Drawing on the exhibition’s title, Einfühlung, a German term that means "feeling into" or "empathy," Pellehn Blum establishes a framework with which to understand his works, through the defining concept of German Romanticism of the same name, which emphasizes the emotional connection developed between the viewer and an artwork. Through visceral, gestural brushstrokes and innovatively collaged photography, both evocative of the fragmentation of memory, the artist stirs the human capacity to project feelings onto objects. This in turn engages the viewer to experience the artist’s works as if they were based on their own memories, a feeling akin to reading a book or seeing a movie where the plot and characters personally resonate, except here it is achieved within the context of an art gallery. 

- Tatiana Marcel

Tatiana Marcel is an Assistant Curator at Americas Society and a PhD student at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Her research focuses on modern Latin American and Latinx art. Her work has been published in distinguished publications including the International Journal of Surrealism. She has previously worked at David Zwirner and obtained her B.A in Art History and Anthropology from Columbia University.