BEAUTY - The Flower Show

Beauty and transience, love and death. No other living thing appears more frequently in symbolism than the flower. And in art history, the history of the flower picture is one of the most exciting and complex themes. This exhibition brings together for the first time diverse approaches within contemporary floral photography.

Vera Mercer has photographed flowers against neutral backdrops since 2005. Reducing their natural colorfulness with the aid of digital processing as a compositional moment, her final images are reminiscent of the tinted black and white photographs of Pictorialism. Mercer sometimes takes single flowers as her subject, such as a lone amaryllis standing erect in its axis. At other times the artist showcases couples, like a pair of white rose blossoms bending out over the vase’s edge with their weight.

In the early 1990s Wilfried Bauer realized a black and white series that is as tender as it is melancholic. In rural northern Germany the artist discovered a field of withered and dried sunflowers. Although they were merely intended for harvest and further processing in cattle feed, in Bauer’s photographic eye the flowers posed an ideal metaphor for death. In contrast to Bauer’s austere flower arrangements is the opulence of the still lifes by Dutch photographer Margriet Smulders. Often photographed at extreme perspectives to create illusive pictorial spaces, her images reference Flemish and Dutch baroque painting. In the 17th century Holland was the most important trade center for flowers – many of them precious – and its bourgeois affluence often found expression in the so- called “flower pieces.” Smulders doubles her blossoms and stems, branches and vines in water and glass surfaces, rendering them immemorial.

It is the rose in particular – which Smulders presents as striking and enigmatic – that stands for the dualism of love and death, for instance as the eternal bond between two lovers lasting well beyond their earthly existence. This is how we may see the roses that appear in the Venetian cemetery photographs by Gerhard Kassner, which take both a melancholic and distanced look at the allegorical tie between loving and suffering. That most of the flowers are or could be artificial underlines this dualism.

The lily is another flower associated with death, although for the cult of the Virgin Mary it also stands for purity and innocence. Here the lily is colorfully illuminated: Eliška Bartek experiments in her Swiss studio with different colored light upon white lilies that she then photographs at close distances. Bartek’s sophisticated use of light takes us on a sensual excursion into the realm of the lily and its possible meanings. Flowers’ colorful magnificence – be they natural, cultivated or, as here, contrived – is tempered by the fact that we humans, alone, are able to perceive color in nature.

We encounter a fusion of several motifs in the works of Michael Wesely, whose extreme time-lapse images make the process of floral deterioration manifest. Their reception demands more attention than usual, to decipher the fragments within the images. Here, we can observe how tulip stems lose their elasticity during an exposure time of several days’ length; a great deal of beauty may be found in the principle of transience. In the works of Amin El Dib on the other hand, a different aspect of decay confronts us. His black and white sequence reveals in full format the swollen stems of cut flowers coated in slimy vase water residue. Observing the gruesomely fascinating photographs, the dying flowers’ rotten odor – and the smell of death – virtually wafts into our nose. Vanitas has many faces; this one here is a grimace.

BEAUTY - The Flower Show
A Gentle Force – Flowers in Contemporary Photography
Kurator: Matthias Harder

Künstler: Eliska Bartek, Wilfried Bauer, Jessica Backhaus, Amin El Dib, Stephan Erfurt, Hans Hansen, Gerhard Kassner, Sofia Koukoulioti, Christian Rothmann, Vera Mercer, Miron Schmückle, Margriet Smulders, Luzia Simons, Michael Wesely