Georg Kolbe Museum

The lifelong artistic occupation of herman de vries (born 1931) with nature is both poetical and radical. The retrospective exhibition at the Georg Kolbe Museum and organized in cooperation with the German Environment Agency unites key works by the German-Dutch artist from the past 50 years. He has been counted among the most influential protagonists of Environmental Art since his show at the 2015 Venice Biennale. His work with nature came about via informal painting in the international climes of the ZERO group. herman de vries has lived withdrawn in the Steigerwald region of Franconia in Southern Germany since the nineteen seventies, setting off from there on his extended local and worldwide expeditions. Archiving and cataloguing what he collected in striking diversity, he brings his exacting scientific studies back to an artistic context. Like almost no other artist, he turned early to the imbalanced relationship between humankind and nature, creating a stringent oeuvre far removed from fashionable artistic currents that is today – not only through the Fridays for Future movement and the tangible impact of global warming – more topical than ever before.