June 1 to August 26, 2012
Since it's last year's presentation at Museum Sinclair Haus, ALTANA collection gathered a number of significant acquisitions. For the first time we present among others photographies by Mike & Doug Starn, Boris Becker, and the impressive room installation "Throe" by the young British artist Claire Morgan. In a deeply poetic way the piece questions our emotional and rational relation to nature.
ALTANA Cultural Foundation takes these artistic question as a occasion to invite pieces from the highly prolific collection of Museum Wiesbaden's Science collection to an intriguing dialogue. Night active hunters – associated to works by Kiki Smith – entourage us to a mystical journey towards ourselves. Amazonas' butterflies from Maria Sibylla Merian's collection seem to curiously fly around in a piece by Dario Àlvarez Bassos titled "Humboldt" and the ornament of Peter Schöller's "Dune" echoes in an immaculate Zebra fur from the Science collection. The exhibition "The Aesthetics of Nature" presents alongside artistic media such as painting, drawing, photography, installation, and sculpture objects from the fields of geology, mineralogy, botanics, and zoology and thus blends artistic positions and scientific pieces to a lively exhibition profile. This wonderful synthesis of art and nature again illustrates the relevance of collections as an indispensable cultural and scientific heritage.
