Art Rotterdam
Main section:
Anne Geene - Diana Scherer - Witho Worms
Caroline O'Breen will have a presentation on the relationship between man and his natural environment together with his desire to control nature. The point of departure is the ambiguous tendency of man to cherish nature, while simultaneously recklessly manipulating it or try to change it.
In this edition of Art Rotterdam we will present new works of Anne Geene, Diana Scherer and Witho Worms.
Anne Geene (NL, 1983) captures the hidden beauty of plants and animals. With the help of photography, Geene investigates, collects and arranges the world around her. The camera objectively registers the materials in where Geene is looking for visual similarities, patterns and phenomena. Eventually, her findings are analysed and catalogued according to an apparent logic. Her interpretation of the data is strictly personal and hints to our urge to regulate and understand the world around us.
Anne Geene began her studies on photography at the Royal Academy in The Hague and graduated at Sint Joost, Breda. After this she did the Master Photographic Studies at Leiden University. In 2014, Anne Geene won the ING Unseen Talent Award. Her work is included in various public as well as private collections. In 2018 she was the winner of the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prijs and held a presentation in the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam. Her works are partly purchased by the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
Diana Scherer (1971)focuses on vegetable material. This living material forms the basis of her investigation. She works with biological processes and develops her work by making interventions, working both intuitively or by scientific means. Sherer is fascinated mainly by the dynamics of underground plant parts. She has been captivated by the root system, with its hidden, underground processes. Scherer developed a technique to control the growth of plant roots. In the project Interwoven the natural network of the root system turns into a textile -like material.
Interwoven – Exercises in Root System Domestication originated as an art project with an intuitive approach. It has now developed into an innovative material research and pursuit for a new and responsible textile material. Working on this project she shift between disciplines, from design to art, craft and science.
Witho Worms will show the series "When you look at a landscape". His research on the sublime Norwegian landscape is a quest to be part of the nature, the landscape that he wishes to magnify and knead until he feels it becomes home, his nature, his jungle, in which he can organize and learn to see connections and escape from the complexity and chaos of the world. For this project Worms reformulated the 19th-century technique of carbon printing, which is photographic printing process that is excellently suited for reproducing dark tones. When you look at a landscape you change it, when you photograph it you have changed it.
Witho Worms (1959) is a Dutch artist-photographer. His background in visual anthropology has led him into an ongoing investigation of the medium of photography and its claim for natural representation and factuality. His interest is especially concerned with the landscape. He finds his subjects there where a clear distinction between a natural and cultural environment cannot be made. He investigates the relationship between nature and culture (culture = human nature). In his landscape photography he shows the interrelationships between these concepts. Through a pragmatic and almost scientific approach of my subject matter he wants to explore the fundamentals of photography.
In the presentation we will present the textile materials of plant root weaving of Diana Scherer in an installation as well as in framed artworks. One large tapestry will be combined with a few small more affordable tapestries and a few photographs of tapestries and plant root weavings. The presentation will consist of all new works of Diana Scherer which are not yet created. Furthermore we will present the black and white photography of Witho Worms of the Norwegian landscape in 7 or 8 different framed carbon prints. All works are realized in 2019.