Luzia Simons

Luzia Simons

Einzigartige Blumenstillleben zwischen Natur und Illusion

Since 1996, Luzia Simons (b. 1953, Brazil; lives and works in Berlin), employing a novel and extraordinary imaging technique, has created a large number of enchanting works that make up her series Stockage. Arranging the flowers and leaves of a wide variety of tulip species on a specialized high-resolution scanner, she produces scanograms of intensely brilliant colors and tremendous acuity. As in digital photography, the data produced by the scanner are then output onto often very large physical media and mounted behind plexiglass. Simons also stages the tulips as a sort of homage to Baroque Dutch or Flemish still lifes with flowers, sometimes suggesting the “tulipomania” in seventeenth-century Holland, the ultimately ruinous trade with tulips and their bulbs. Now a wild-growing Asian plant, now a species overbred to satisfy modern Western European demand, the motif of the tulip spans the chasm between nature and culture, and that, Simons believes, makes it a unique material on the level of form as well as content for her ethereal utopia of beauty.

Includes contributions by Matthias Harder and Hans-Olaf Henkel.