For her digital book commissioned by D’ORO D’ART, Birnbaum reworked her 2011 installation into a unique vertically-oriented format. The integrated sound and image together retrace the problematic love and artistic relationship of Robert and Clara Schumann. Birnbaum brought together selections from YouTube videos of the abundance of performances of Robert Schumann’s Arabesque Opus 18 contrasted with a sole example of Clara Schumann’s Romanze 1, Opus 11. Birnbaum juxtaposed these clips with still images, morphing into one another, taken from the 1947 film about the Schumanns, Song of Love, which tellingly features only Robert Schumann’s Arabesque Opus 18.

About the D’ORO D’ART Project

With its fifty-year history, video art is celebrated as an audiovisual, time-based category that gives artists the opportunity to articulate ideas of great relevance. Salvatore Giorgio Dino, founder and CEO of the D’ORO Collection, and the experts at D’ORO D’ART project were determined to produce an artwork that combines the highest level of bookmaking craftsmanship with contemporary masterpieces of video art, a field that unites art and technology. The curatorial team, Valentino Catricalà and Barbara London, chose the work of Dara Birnbaum, as an important pioneer of video art and for her commitment to the genre’s dynamic history and to the hybridity of contemporary art practice.

The D’ORO D’ART project is a unique collaboration between the D’ORO Collection, fine art book publishers based in Rome, and Marian Goodman Gallery, a leading contemporary art gallery based in New York, Paris and London.