Anne Geene - Grasses
'Grasses' by Anne Geene is an eulogy on grasses in all their appearances. With this herbagraphic work, Geene continues building an oeuvre that is an expression of the remarkable beauty of the unremarkable. Congruent with the general line of her artistic practice focused on counting, measuring, and creating inventories of nature, the 'Grasses' series brings an ode to this undervalued but widely cultivated groundcover. In Anne Geene’s work, the photograph itself is rarely the focus — taken out of their context the pictures are often no more than a registration of an inconspicuous fact. It is the focus on the unremarkable in nature that distinguishes Geene’s approach: be it leaves eaten by insects, the colour gradations within one tree, or stones arranged by size as shown in her solo exhibition at the Kröller-Müller Museum. 'Grasses' address humanity's selective fascination with certain species over others. Some are considered weeds and removed by force, which stands in contrast to the meticulous care often lavished upon other plant species. Next to 'Grasses', Anne Geene will present the recent developments in her 'Eeuwig Herbarium' series, celebrating grass.
The Great Moon Hoax - Anne Geene & Arjan de Nooy
is inspired by the English polymath John Herschel (1792-1871). In his days, he was involved in a famous hoax regarding the supposed discovery of life on the Moon (Geene & De Nooy often use fictitious stories in their own work). The 'observations' were published in 1835 in The Sun, and were falsely (but humoristically) attributed to Herschel to give credibility to the articles. The story introduces all kinds of non-existing animals or animals with non-existing behaviour like unicorns and temple-building beavers. Using DALL-E, a chatbot that can be instructed to produce fictitious ‘photographs’, Geene and De Nooy made a reconstruction of the story.