Private collection, Amsterdam
In her subjects Ansuya Blom expresses her fascination for the human condition that is continuously embedded in a 'dizziness of freedom’. She often opens histories of patients caught up in their own world, sometimes living in secured surroundings like mental institutions.
The writer Ezra Pound was a central figure of the modernist movement and ended as a patient of the Chestnut Ward at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Boston. Pound was highly appreciated as an innovator of language, but he was also controversial. At the end of the war he was accused of treason by the American authorities due to his radio broadcastings for the Italian fascists from Rapallo, Italy in 1941. He was a great admirer of Mussolini. After the trial he was sentenced to hospitalization in a psychiatric institution. Ansuya Blom: " What fascinates me is how someone can combine such, in my eyes, conflicting positions with each other ’’