'Sometimes, I wonder if I would know a beautiful thing if I saw it.'

VIEW WORKS​

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​​„Sometimes, I wonder if I would know a beautiful thing if I saw it.“

(Megan Fernandes, 'Love Poem')

 

We have prefaced this group exhibition with the above line from a poem by US poet Megan Fernandes. It came to us while thinking about the relationship between humans and nature in these scary times. In conversations with artists we have noticed a certain shift in thinking: away from a strong preoccupation with life in metropolitan regions towards a deeper engagement with our relationships to nature and the landscape. Not in the sense of escapism, but in the sense of recalibrating our role in this great whole. The books of the philosopher Timothy Morton, professor at Rice University in Texas, have always been important to us. This longer quote sums up perfectly in which direction this exhibition could steer our thinking:

 

„If we do not learn to understand ourselves as part of a diverse whole, nothing can change in the separation of "nature" and "culture", which ultimately legitimizes the fact that human societies treat everything non-human as available raw material for their own needs. Now, on the subject of ecology, I’ve been holding for a while that the concept of Nature is a sort of anthopocentrically scaled concept, designed for humans, so it’s not strictly relevant to thinking about ecology. In fact, it might even be, for various different reasons, a bit of a disaster. The first way in which it’s a bit of a disaster is that it separates the human from the non-human world by sort of an arbitrary aesthetic screen. A little bit like all the non-humans are kind of behind the glass screen of our laptop – of course there are certain non-humans that we select to be inside human social space. “Cattle” is what they’re called in old-fashioned patriarchy. We’d also include pets and so on, certain plants, agricultural products. Everything else is Nature, and it’s supposed to be somewhere else, other than this human space that we like to think of as exclusively human, an anthropocentric space.“

 

Statements

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Dorian Büchi

My painting practice is inspired by stories and essays exploring our complex relationship with the environment, highlighting both the loss of knowledge and our experiences with the natural world. These narratives expose our longing to reconnect with the wild, yet often without the necessary commitment or understanding. Instead of engaging in a true exchange with nature, we tend to take from it, reflecting a broader cultural tendency to exploit rather than coexist. Influenced by writers like Barry Lopez, Aldo Leopold, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Ernest Thompson Seton, my work delves into these themes, drawing on the wisdom and mistakes of those who have chronicled our fading connection to the earth. These authors have profoundly shaped my understanding of the delicate balance between humanity and nature. In my recent works, I explore this disconnection further through the lens of modern contemporary imagery. By focusing on cropped images that reference social media, I use zoomed-in perspectives to create tension and mystery, symbolizing how our visually saturated, digitally distorted lives mirror our fragmented relationship with the environment. These pieces critique how we consume curated fragments of nature, mistaking them for true nourishment, much like our superficial interactions with the natural world that lack true consciousness and respect for its essence.

 

Lobo & Blanca

While reading Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez, I came across a list of Outlaw wolves. I found rather bizarre, that we humans would treat Wolves as common criminals that needed to answer for their “crimes”.  On the list, one name caught my attention, Lobo, the king of the Currumpaw. Lobo was a North American Mexican gray wolf, who lived in New Mexico's Currumpaw Valley during the 1890s. As settlers deprived his pack of natural prey, Lobo turned to livestock, pushing ranchers to attempt poisoning and trapping the wolf pack for years, but all these efforts failed. After other government employed hunters failed, naturalist and hunter Ernest Thompson Seton, enticed by the bounty set for the renegade King, tried various methods to kill him, all thwarted by Lobo's cunning. Eventually, Seton realized Lobo's weakness was his mate, Blanca. After trapping and killing her, Seton used Blanca's scent to lure Lobo into a trap on January 31, 1894. Despite his injuries, Lobo's bravery touched Seton, who refrained from killing him and brought him back to the ranch to study him, but Lobo died that night, likely of a broken heart. Seton and the rancher took Lobo’s body and laid him next to Blanca. Lobo was the last wolf Seton ever killed, what happened changed Seton forever. After going back east, he wrote a book, the animals I have known, and the first story in the book is Lobo’s.

 

Marc Kaempfen

My work consists of oil paintings on canvas and writing. It ranges from constructed imaginative compositions to life sketches and memories translated into finished works. A major focus is on landscape imagery. I question various legacies of logic and perception, notions of nature and ownership. Various sources of inspiration such as film frames, mythologies, plays or direct personal experience of the real nourish the content of the works. Light is another major theme, as it comes with the paint, as a material in itself; descriptive, atmospheric and narrative. The way I look at the world says something about me, about absence and presence. It is the voyeuristic act of the reader, the night walker, on the vastness of the surrounding elements, the ability to imagine and dissolve.

 

Noemi Pfister

Noemi Pfister combines motifs from art history and popular culture in her paintings, thus playing with references from collective memory. Enigmatic figures that seem to come from a parallel world linger in her dreamlike landscapes. Their bodies appear anatomically deformed. They sit on skateboards or scroll on their mobile phones. The pictorial worlds are sometimes reminiscent of the compositions of old masterpieces, but the figures' clothing, postures and objects reflect our present day. In the connection between the familiar and the ominous, her pictures explore what future forms of communities we might live in.

 

In Emma Kunz's Grotte, the rocky cave offers a hospitable refuge, a kind of answer to those who wish to hide from urban sprawl. "Nature", seen here in its restorative and compassionate dimension, serves the artist as a therapeutic retreat. The protagonist, bathed in warm light, evokes the serenity of the present moment. Yet he seems to be in a transient state. He has fallen asleep and is dangling his leg in order to stay awake and not fall asleep completely.

 

Rose Ras

My two works in the exhibition play on materiality and texture, inviting the viewer to reflect on the relationship between the object and its environment. Each image carefully creates a contemplative and sometimes enigmatic atmosphere, where art and nature meet and mutually transform.

 

Fatma Shanan

Fatma Shanan’s oeuvre connects to multiple threads of European representative painting of the past two centuries. In most of her self-portraits and landscapes, each stroke of color is placed at a slight distance from the next to create abstraction within figuration, a practice based on the artist’s desire to merge matter and spirit. The desert landscapes and varied interior and outdoor settings reveal the nonwestern contexts in and around her native village of Julis, a Druze community in northern Israel, as well as her former home in Tel Aviv and other sites beyond. Recurring motifs – the Oriental carpet, abundant foliage and flowers, electrical cording – directly or indirectly delineate physical and psychological boundaries that are balanced, tested, and pushed to their limits, as well as notions of connection or detachment. ®Kimberlay Bradley and Dittrich&Schlechtriem Gallery Berlin

 

Grégory Sugnaux

Grégory Sugnaux explores global visual cultures and their iconography which he processes in thematic series. His research is based on archives of images and materials, including media such by as art historical book illustration, photography, video, video games and comics, which are constantly growing and being rearranged in iconographic cross sections and lines of development. His work is generally concerned with the status of the image through the mediation of exhibition and painting. In extracting the familiar image from its existing pictorial codes, he rejects hierarchical values in art history and tries to turn attention to the representation of alternative systems in image-making.