Kominek Gallery presents the exhibition e-Herbarium by Joan Fontcuberta.
For Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955), photographing nature is a way to reflect on the nature of photography. His renowned project Herbarium (1982-84) did exactly that: illustrating a time of growing environmental awareness, biotech or genetic control over living forms. Fontcuberta’s eye was already well trained on conceptual art, counterculture (mainly Dadaism and Surrealism) and Postmodernism. Herbarium revamped botanic illustrations in a post-industrial world, while paying an ironic homage to German photographer Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932).
After four decades taking Herbarium to art galleries worldwide, nature and photography have changed quite a bit. Their evolution has been a major subject in Fontcuberta’s works as a renowned photographer, essayist and curator, so he thought about revisiting his own debut in 2024 using tools like generative artificial intelligence (AI). The result was e- Herbarium, as thought-provoking and valid as it was back in the Eighties, hosted by the Kominek Gallery in Berlin.
Post-nature as art
It all started in the same Berlin a century ago, while sculptor Karl Blossfeldt was teaching modeling from plants at the School of Arts and Crafts. The close-up pictures of plants he used as reference material for his students became monuments of modern photography. Blossfeldt celebrated nature’s elegant shapes in his acclaimed publication Urformen der Kunst (Original forms of art, 1928), a reference work in Germany’s New Objectivity movement.
Blossfeldt’s exquisite aesthetics and his romantic view of nature as the source of art forms inspired Joan Fontcuberta. He applied these ideas to a post-natural, polluted world where life forms were not the result of natural selection anymore, but artificial human intervention. His detailed portraits in black and white display a hybrid mix of plants and bits of waste found in Barcelona’s industrial areas, from plastics to bones or animal parts.
New specimens like Himenea flaccida, Cala rasca or Guillumeta polymorpha were the surprising result, as well as a renewed interest in the works of Karl Blossfeldt. In 1985 Berlin University exhibited a selection of Blossfeldt’s originals next to Fontcuberta’s images for Herbarium, curated by Joachim Schmid. Many galleries and museums worldwide would follow.
Alchemy and algorithm
Apart from anticipating subjects like cloning, biotech and environmental issues, Herbarium challenged our assumptions about the objectivity of scientific images. Originally conceived as a new view on Blossfeldt’s legacy, this 2024 e-Herbarium version reimagines Joan Fontcuberta’s exhibition in the digital age.
Fontcuberta has already explored the possibilities of image-generation AI tools in projects like Florilegium, De rerum natura or his reference writings. Now he’s used his original pictures of Herbarium as a learning model, and introduced current subjects as AI prompts. This mix of old and new generates surprising plot twists in his own visual narrative, while reinforcing his theories about photography moving from alchemy to algorithm.
The secret truth of plants
As in Fontcuberta’s subsequent works, there’s more to Herbarium than meets the eye. Like the best jokes, this new botanic atlas hits the nail on different subjects like it did 40 years ago. Images seen as autonomous living creatures in the image-packed 2020s; the limits between reality and fiction; the illusion of truth in photographic documents; our likeness to accept arguments based on beliefs rather than facts; and our approach to an ever changing nature.
Beyond e-Herbarium, the collaboration between Joan Fontcuberta and the Kominek Gallery in 2024 also includes a special edition of Fontcuberta’s Fauna (1985-89) by Kominek Books, and his new project What Darwin missed.
Joan Fontcuberta : e-Herbarium
14 Sept — 26 Oct 2024
Exhibition opening: 14 sept 2024 6pm
Kominek Gallery
Immanuelkirchstrasse 25
10405 Berlin, Germany
www.kominekominekominek.com
Kominek Gallery Berlin / Opening hours:
Fridays 12-19 and on appointment
