Sunken Gardens
Helene Schmitz
Untitled 3
Image size: 150 x 112 cm
With frame: 155 x 117 cm
Edition 5 + 2 AP
"Sunken Gardens" by Helene Schmitz - on displayed at Willa's Contemporary in Oslo
- is a veritable
visual and mental kick!
It's like entering a world both familiar, but manufactured
in a strange way. Nature is warlike, swallowing culture for lunch. Buildings
and other symbols of culture goes with the tide. Nature takes over, overcomes
culture in the pictures. They are great, both in format, curating and not least
because of the photographic craft. I wandered around the Angkor Wat ruins in
Cambodia years ago. There I felt the same presence of a nature that requires
back, filling the void left by manmade culture. For Schmitz pictures are about
the absence of people and the overwhelming presence of nature. Where Asians are
trying to find the balance between nature and culture, the nature Western
culture becomes brutal because it has provided no room for coexistence, rather
battle and war. When we also manipulate nature, it strikes even more brutally
back at culture. Left in Schmitz pictures are memories of culture and an
overwhelming, almost frightening silence and the dominance of nature. It is - in
my opinion - best expressed in black and white. It really gets the vegetation
to breath of silent revenge. In the great plant portraits, thoughts fly to the
ongoing Mapplethorpe + Munch exhibition at the Munch Museum. Schmitz conveys - unlike
- Mapplethorpe a subtle, feminine interpretation of nature. She is therefore
interestingly enough more open to a dialogue with culture / nature than
Mapplethorpes loaded, homoerotic expressions.
No wonder the only thing that
breaks the exhibition quiet and meditative rest at Willa Contemporary is the
undergrowth of red dots.
My wife thinks:
absolutely fantastic, it gave me a kick. Black and white pictures: spectacular!
Schmitz
was born 1960 in Stockholm, and holds a BA in Film & Art Theory from Stockholm University in Sweden. Cinematography is a
major source of inspiration for Schmitz in her exploration of architecture and
spatiality. She is interested in spaces as carriers of meaning, memories and
references.
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