About the Exhibition
Since the beginning of his career, Schmückle has been consistently interacting with art history as well as with flora and fauna of faraway places. And yet, his creations do not come from nature but from the artist’s mind. The exhibition showed around 30 works oscillating between finely painted hyperrealism, precise observations of nature and a rich power of imagination.
The Romanian-German artist Miron Schmückle (b. in Sibiu/Hermannstadt in 1966) is among the singular protagonists of contemporary art. Growing up in Romania under Ceaușescu, already as a child he dreamt himself away to other worlds—worlds that, on the far side of the Iron Curtain, seemed forever inaccessible.
The virtually botanical approach of his depictions belies the fact that his complex creations originate not in nature but in fantasy. Based on his understanding and observations of nature with its widely differing colours, forms, and surface textures, they bear a relation to florilegia and exhibit similarities to Renaissance and Baroque plant and still-life painting of the kind once collected in cabinets of art and curiosities. With the series “Cosmic Attractors” (2023) carried out especially for the exhibition “Flesh for Fantasy”, the artist invited the visitors to partake of the spatial and temporal complexity of his floral figments of the imagination, which in his conception are three-dimensional. By arranging different large-scale views and visual manifestations of one and the same plant composition in space, he created an installation in which viewers could literally witness the plants’ growth.
Curator
Dr Philipp Demandt (Director, Städel Museum)
Film
