For this exhibition, Maura Biava invited several artists to elaborate with her on the theme of patterns, exploring and depicting nature, and its relation to mathematics and symmetry. With the works of Maura Biava, Anne Geene, Emily Joyce, and Saskia Van Drimmelen, this show revolves around the ideas of information and hidden geometries behind what we see in nature at first glance. According to Biava, an idea of a human being as a neutral observer is outdated. To understand ourselves as a logical part of natural systems, as well as to address the climate crisis, the artist seeks a shift of attention from admiration for nature to an investigation into it.
In the natural world, pattern structures are central to morphogenesis — the biological process causing cells and organisms to develop their shape. Together with symmetry and repetition, patterns often form order in nature. For many scientists, the capacity of humans to recognise patterns is considered a crux of our intellect and at the core of our ability to communicate, imagine, empathise, and invent. "Pattern," wrote Charles DiJulio from the Criss-Cross art movement, “is the diametric opposite of the hierarchic." In contrast with hierarchic systems, a pattern is cooperative, democratic, inclusive, and has no center. For **title of the expo**, Biava invited the forementioned artists to elaborate on patterns while relating to nature and each other’s work.
Maura Biava — an Italian, Amsterdam-based artist — is intrigued by how the regular forms of the organic world originate according to specific mathematic rules. In her artistic practice, Biava aims to create works that follow the same principles. “The interaction between information, matter, and energy informs and shapes what we see, it forms our reality,” says Maura Biava. To show this interaction in her work, she uses clay as matter, mathematics and numbers as information, and her actions and hands at work as energy. The Dutch artist-photographer Anne Geene works with organic material and records visual similarities and phenomena in the natural world. The interrelation of coincidence and patterns is celebrated in her work. Emily Joyce, a California-based artist, investigates nature, the urban world, and art history through pattern-based rhythmic abstraction. In her paintings, he uses interlocking geometric compositions to communicate on a level that is realistic, logical, fantastic, and humorous at the same time. In **title of the expo**, the artworks borrow the complexity of the language that nature uses to take its form and suggest the integral systems that our very existence is based upon.