.2024
Philipp Wieder’s exhibition, “Natura Morta”, is an elegy in images, having as its subtitle “the morbid beauty of decay”. The presented works are part of a still unfinished series, developed by the German artist since several years and which was presented, in different selections and formats, in galleries and museums, in solo shows or group exhibitions.
Philipp Wieder’s flowers and plants are like Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller, repositories of collective memory, entitled to attention because they already have most of their lives behind them. Every dry vein, every withered petal, every contorted stem – all are evidence of a bygone time. The viewer is invited on a journey where the signs of aging and deterioration are like the deep wrinkles on the face of a sage – for Wieder’s photographs have something of the charm of old oil paintings, confessions of past season.
In the agony of slow decay, plants have a special beauty. It is not the vital beauty of youth, but a melancholic one, full of sadness and tenderness at the same time. It’s like a transfer, where freshness is traded for the graceful and wise fragility of senescence. It is precisely this fragility that inspired Wieder in his compositions. Seen through the lens of the camera, the dying flowers initiated the artist in the gradual discovery of details in the great creation of Nature. The photographs of this series explore a universe that transcends visual perception – and thus a «botanical process» becomes art, meditation, emotion and symbol.
Difficult subjects, that of aging and decay, that of death ending the cycle of life to make way for a new one, are transgressed into the artistic area and subjected to our perception through the filter of the plant world, allowing the viewer to approach them – aesthetically, on the surface, and ideologically, in depth, without revulsion and disgust, but on the contrary, with admiration and empathy.
The works of the whole series are deliberately devoid of background elements, the focus is exclusively on the delicate beauty of dying plants. As in the three stages of elegy, lamentation, admiration and consolation, Wieder’s photographs communicate intense emotions through a refined and sophisticated visual language, whose imprint is undeniable.
Artist
Philipp Wieder
Born in Stuttgart in 1955, Philipp Wieder worked in advertising agencies as a designer before becoming a freelance artist specializing in photography and multimedia and founding his own creative agency in Nuremberg, where he has been based since 2013. Interested in nature and the Far East, he made numerous series of photographs and films with these themes and often exhibited in collaboration with other artists. He successfully participated in numerous photography competitions and gave lectures on the subjects that concern him, illustrated by photographs and films.
In recent years, he has been interested in how the passage of time changes the appearance of plants and alters their conventional beauty, photographing and filming especially flowers, from the bud stage to the dry stem, bearing or not fruits.
The aesthetics of decomposition is not a new theme in art (it was one of the favorite themes of the late baroque), but it is currently being revisited by artists in the context of postmodern and postindustrial society. Connected with other important themes of postmodernism – the memory of space, the architecture of the Anthropocene and the new relationship of man with nature, Wieder’s photography allows for successive looks at the process of alteration – in its various stages. As flowers wither and die, their vivid colors and shapes fade, contours change and the volume is lost. The “nine stages of decay”, as conceptualized in the approaches of important contemporary artists, such as Azuma Makoto, author of “botanical installations”, compose a tableau vivant that changes gradually, from the flower at the culmination of its life cycle, full of color, to the dry cellulose stem, emptied of fluids.
Wieder’s photographs evoke painting in various ways, seeking to highlight the aesthetics of plants as a parable of the action of time on every living organism – of course, primarily on humans. Wieder also sees in these artistic researches a mirror of his own evolution, an radiography of the way in which the passage of years changes our appearance, an attempt to recover the idea of beauty at any age and to free it from the canons linking attractiveness to flourishing, respectively youth. Beyond his research and artistic practice, Wieder collects information about the plants he shoots and composes short informative and sometimes anecdotal texts to accompany the works.
His participation in the Romanian Creative Week is Philipp Wieder’s first exhibition outside Germany. The “Still Life” series, a project still in progress, has been presented in recent years in various galleries and museums (Galerie LeonArt, kultur.lokal.fürth, Zeltner Schloss, Plassenburg – Bund fränkischer Künstler, Ludwig-Dörfler-Museum) and received the Audience Award at the « Aichacher Kunstpreis » 2021 competition.
Curator
Cristina Simion
Curator and gallerist Cristina Simion has designed and curated more than 100 solo and group exhibitions, especially of contemporary artists from Eastern Europe, with focus on Romania, in Nuremberg, Munich, Paris, Berlin, Bayreuth (Germany), Bucharest, Timisoara, Cluj-Napoca, Sibiu, Iasi, Brasov (Romania), Rome, Civitella d’Agliano (Italy), Ljubljana, Bled (Slovenia), Brussels (Belgium), Schmerikon (Switzerland), Chișinău (Modova). She has been co-curator of the International Biennale of Visual Arts in Brașov, in 2019 and 2021.
With a special interest in the new figurative art, she wrote, edited and coordinated art catalogues and albums and published articles in various cultural magazines, in English and Romanian.
She has been based in Nuremberg, Germany, since 2012, where she runs the Tiny Griffon Gallery. With a PhD in change management in non-standardized industries and more than two decades of previous experience in media management, journalism and communication, Cristina Simion is a graduate of the International Curatorial Course organized by NODE Center for Curatorial Studies Berlin (2018-2019) and of the Art Collections Management Course of the same institution (2022). She graduated from the Introduction to Art and Finance course of the Sotheby’s Institute of Arts New York (2022). She lectured in art management at Civitella d’Agliano international art camp, at Horasis Global Meeting, at the West University Timisoara and Transilvania University Brasov. In 2022, she took part in the international programme “Artists at Risk”, art residencies for artists from the Ukraine.