Metamorphosis of Plants

Adrian Burns and Sofia Goscinski
curated by Denise Wendel-Poray

Soft opening am 8. März von 16:00 bis 20:00 Uhr
Um 18:00 Uhr wird die neue Monografie Imbroglio (Skira 2021) von Adrian Burns vorgestellt.
Bitte beachten Sie die geltenden Corona-Regeln!

The exhibition Metamorphosis of Plants, whose title is inspired by Goethe’s 1790 botanical essay, offers an immersion into woods, deserts and forests through the eyes of Austrian artist Sofia Goscinski and Mexican photographer Adrian Burns. Travelling through their gazes, and their chosen media — sculpture, painting, and photography — nature is a subject of pictorial experimentation. On the way, as we witness their metamorphosis and imprint on art, we become aware of our relationship to all living organisms. Goethe suggested a “secret relation subsisting between the different external organs of plants, such as leaves, calyx, corolla, and stamens.” Thirty years later, inspired by Goethe, Indian biologist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose made several pioneering discoveries in plant physiology (The Nervous Mechanism of Plants, 1926), notably that plants are also capable of discriminating between positive and negative experiences and of learning by registering memories from their past experiences and use this information to adapt their behaviour to survive present and future challenges in their environments.