The context matters, in every way.

The passers-by on the outside of the window panes of the Frankfurter Kunstverein look at an installation with UV-illuminated plants, at the enormous, first exposed and then preserved roots of an ash tree.

The scientists from Forschungszentrum Jülich, who deal with the phenotyping of plants, are themselves a bit surprised that their work in this context looks like art.

Eva-Maria Magel

Head of culture editor Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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In the exhibition “The Intelligence of Plants”, however, this first room at the beginning of the course serves to a certain extent for the viewer's basic research. The unknown, hidden half of the plant world, the invisible, but which will determine how things will continue with humans and earth, joins the art that follows - and which will be accompanied by dialogical tours by natural scientists and art curators.

Because their view of a VR installation like “Treehugger: Wawona” (2017) by the London artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast should once again bring to light completely different aspects of the life cycle of a sequoia tree than the experience of the VR user.

While the paper works of the indigenous Colombian Abel Rodríguez, born in 1941 and expelled from his ancestral forest region, his "árbol de la vida y la abundancia", for example, put ecological, economic and sociological contexts up for debate and Berlinde De Bruyckere turned two fallen oaks into downright injured corpses, as Memento mori.

Three floors of art that is not too densely packed

How science is reflected in art, how art appropriates the processes and knowledge of art, how the duet of spheres that are often thought of in opposition can contribute to conveying knowledge and empathy, is a recurring theme in the exhibitions at the Kunstverein. Now “The Intelligence of Plants” opens another chapter. The human being as a co-being of the plants wanders through three floors with art that is not too densely piled up, which revolves above all on those parts of the co-being of plants that we do not see.

When an artist like Nicola Toffolini shows the quiet, extremely patient art of drawing exactly opposite the light and sound designed VR installation, time plays an enormous role, almost in time spans like the growth of trees. Toffolini, born in 1975, caresses head-high cross-sections of the ground in delicate detail, fills page after page of folding fan-folds with a text-image narration of the secret life of plants, uses the visual history of science for his art.

This arc of suspense of ingenious technology and refined simplicity characterizes the dramaturgy of the course curated by Kunstverein director Franziska Nori on the first floor. There Diana Scherer welcomes the visitor using stencils in the form of oat sod that has now been turned upside down, the roots facing the viewer in the entrance to the floor. In the course of the exhibition, the fresh green of the oats will dry out, approach the preserved patterns that hang on the walls as examples of Scherer's organic art.

Right next to it there is a reunion with Thomas Feuerstein, who presented his biotechnical experiments in Nori's first own exhibition in 2015.

"Hydra" exhibits the hidden, even the technically complex of nature, with hundreds of meters of transparent hoses that curl through the room like lifelines, washed through by the green liquid of the chlorella algae, which create a stylized reactor, mixture of underground Boat and whale, filters.

A whole installation was created around this "Green Blood", the title of a wall painting.

And in the polyp-shaped glass vials, as we now know, real life pulsates.

The exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein can be seen Tuesday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. and Thursday until 9 p.m. until January 30, 2022.