BERND LIEVEN
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
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INTRODUCTION
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C.V.
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PUBLICATIONS
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WORKS
Fields
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Gardens
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ABOUT THE ARTIST
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INTRODUCTION
On Garden Art and Art Fertilizer
Reconciling nature and culture, in opposition since as long as mankind can remember, is a dream that has found its most artificial and endearing development in landscape gardening. This is where nature’s force is civilized, its overwhelming growth regimented through style and fashion. These seemingly harmless spaces, in which nature is robbed of all its foreboding, are nothing more than a variation of the Old Testament theme: “Make the Earth your Subject.”
Bernd Lieven (*1961 in Mönchengladbach) has traced this traditional genre, removing it from reality through his photography, and shifting it from the photographic into the painterly through additional photo editing. He places his atmospheric porches opposite the apparently uncontrolled growth of grains as a further example of the affair between man and nature. However, the image is immediately broken by tractor tracks or clearly calculated planting borders. This is how sublime studies of the tense relationship between romantic yearning and economy arise, compressed in detailed photographs that can simultaneously produce references to art history, to the idea of baroque garden culture or the landscape studies of Courbet.
Dr. Boris von Brauchitsch
