Luzia Simons: from the series Stockage, Blacklist and Lustgarten

Luzia Simons has spent the last few years investigating floral iconography and adopting an artistic stance on the subject. Beyond L'art pour l'art, Simons stages her flowers in a unique combination of material precision, beauty and vanitas. The technique she chooses for her works is extraordinary: for her tulip arrangements with series title Stockage she does not use a camera, but a special scanner with which she can achieve an incomparable spatial image depth. The representation of the tulips oscillates between extreme closeness and great distance, creating fantastic, illusionistic images.

In her series Lustgarten the artist goes one step further and places all kinds of exotic creatures together with her flower arrangements. With a certain wink of the eye, she thus stages small dialogues of hidden insects and small reptiles - all of them artificial - that have been added to the ephemeral compositions and suggest supposed life.

In her series Blacklist, Simons refers with the structured arrangement of objects in front of a neutral background to the natural scientist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). In numerous, similarly arranged studies, Merian created the "Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium", which is one of the pioneering works of entomology. Luzia Simons reconstructs the fragile creatures with petals in Blacklist. With the metamorphosis into plant life, the insect-like is alienated and thus turned into a playful and light environment.