Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek
30 Mar - 19 May 2007
CORNELIA SCHMIDT-BLEEK
"The Simple Task Of Tenacity"
(or How can you not plant roses when the forests are burning?)
How can you plant roses when the forests are burning at the same time? This question was put forward in the 1930s by the French architecture organisation CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Árchitecture Moderne). The answer came in the slightly altered question: How can you not plant roses when the forests are burning? Roughly two generations later, Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek has taken up this formulation and placed it at the centre of her artistic inquiries. The artist explores the relationship between plants, people and society in her works, relating plants to social developments and models. In her show at the Gallery Hohenlohe, the artist devotes herself to Defiant Gardens*, gardens that have been created under extreme social, political or economic conditions.
One room contains works on paper that have been drawn with pomegranate juice. Here Schmidt-Bleek has taken as a central theme the story of a garden in the Guantanamo prison in Cuba. A few prisoners in Guantanamo planted their own garden by collecting the seeds for the various plants, such as lemons or green peppers, from their meals. Although pomegranates are considered native to the Caribbean islands, their actual origin is Persia – the geographical area from which many of the prisoners come.
The works in the next two rooms deal with the psychological and physical influence of plants on people. With a pyramid structure made of plexiglas, the artist is referring to the Maslow pyramid of needs. This is based on a five level model that was developed in the 1950s by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, a model that describes the hierarchical structure of human needs. Schmidt-Bleek stands the pyramid on its head and decorates it with unruly cactus plants.
In a slide installation, in which various bouquets of flowers are scientifically presented, the artist deals with the Duchenne Smile, the inner or “true” smile that cannot be influenced by outer circumstances. An American psychologist by the name of Ekman did research on this kind of smile, naming it after the nineteenth century French neurologist Duchenne.
For Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek, botany is the pivot and key to her sculptures, installations and drawings, in which plants always play a central role. Plants help the artist to contend with social and political questions, and thus to reveal new associations and possibilities of approaching them.
* Kenneth Helphand, Defiant Gardens. Making Gardens in Wartime, Trinity University Press 2006
"The Simple Task Of Tenacity"
(or How can you not plant roses when the forests are burning?)
How can you plant roses when the forests are burning at the same time? This question was put forward in the 1930s by the French architecture organisation CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Árchitecture Moderne). The answer came in the slightly altered question: How can you not plant roses when the forests are burning? Roughly two generations later, Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek has taken up this formulation and placed it at the centre of her artistic inquiries. The artist explores the relationship between plants, people and society in her works, relating plants to social developments and models. In her show at the Gallery Hohenlohe, the artist devotes herself to Defiant Gardens*, gardens that have been created under extreme social, political or economic conditions.
One room contains works on paper that have been drawn with pomegranate juice. Here Schmidt-Bleek has taken as a central theme the story of a garden in the Guantanamo prison in Cuba. A few prisoners in Guantanamo planted their own garden by collecting the seeds for the various plants, such as lemons or green peppers, from their meals. Although pomegranates are considered native to the Caribbean islands, their actual origin is Persia – the geographical area from which many of the prisoners come.
The works in the next two rooms deal with the psychological and physical influence of plants on people. With a pyramid structure made of plexiglas, the artist is referring to the Maslow pyramid of needs. This is based on a five level model that was developed in the 1950s by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, a model that describes the hierarchical structure of human needs. Schmidt-Bleek stands the pyramid on its head and decorates it with unruly cactus plants.
In a slide installation, in which various bouquets of flowers are scientifically presented, the artist deals with the Duchenne Smile, the inner or “true” smile that cannot be influenced by outer circumstances. An American psychologist by the name of Ekman did research on this kind of smile, naming it after the nineteenth century French neurologist Duchenne.
For Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek, botany is the pivot and key to her sculptures, installations and drawings, in which plants always play a central role. Plants help the artist to contend with social and political questions, and thus to reveal new associations and possibilities of approaching them.
* Kenneth Helphand, Defiant Gardens. Making Gardens in Wartime, Trinity University Press 2006