Presence of Plants in Contemporary Art

Artist-activists Heather Ackroyd (b. 1959, UK) and Dan Harvey (b. 1959, England) create works that combine art, activism, ecology, and history, and make reference to memory and time, nature and culture, and political ecologies. Processes of germination, growth, and decay (both organic and inorganic) are integral to artworks that often evolve through extended research in response to people and place, interfacing their long-standing interest in local ecologies and global planetary concerns. Their time-based practice frequently features living plant material.

From the start of their collaboration in 1990, the artists have received international awards and prizes for their bio-chemical photographic work with seedling grass and have been widely commissioned for monumental living architectural interventions in the public sector. They have recently exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2022), Somerset House, London (2022), Tate Modern, London (2021), The Ashmolean, Oxford (2018), and The David Attenborough Building, Cambridge (2016). They participated in the 23RD Biennale of Sydney (2022), ARoS Triennale, Denmark (2017), Cinnamon Colomboscope, Sri Lanka (2017) and have exhibited on many sites of special interest including the Potager de Roi, Versailles, and the Jardin des Plantes, Paris (2015). Ackroyd & Harvey are regarded as leading advocates in placing the climate and ecological emergency at the center of the artistic landscape and in 2019, helped launch the initiative Culture Declares Emergency.

Through drawing, dance, and film, Zheng Bo (b. 1974, China) cultivates intimate relations with plants that are aesthetic, erotic, and political. For Zheng, art does not arise from human creativity, but from ‘more-than-human vibrancy.’ Guided by Daoist wisdom, they develop weedy gardens, living slogans, eco-queer films, and ecosocialist workshops. These diverse projects, alive and entangled, constitute a garden where Zheng collaborates with both human and nonhuman thinkers and activists. Their ecological art practice contributes to an emergent planetary indigeneity.

In 2021, Zheng staged Wanwu Council in Berlin and Life is Hard. Why do we make it so easy? in Hong Kong, they participated in the Sydney Biennale (2022), Liverpool Biennial (2021), Yokohama Triennale (2020), Manifesta (2018), Taipei Biennial (2018), and Shanghai Biennial (2016). Zheng studied with Douglas Crimp and received their Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. They taught at the China Academy of Art, and currently teach at City University of Hong Kong, where they lead the Wanwu Practice Group.

Piero Golia Italian-born, Los Angeles–based artist Piero Golia (b. 1974, Italy) is a sculptor of situations. His Works—which at times take physical form, often at an architectural scale, and at others are Immaterial—are statements aimed at expanding the possibilities of art. His practice is heterogeneous and unpredictable, employing diverse mediums and methods to spark chain reactions that, even when they leave no objects or images behind, have the capacity to alter our perception. As a young man in Naples, Golia studied chemical engineering, learning about the transformation of raw materials into powerful energy sources. Such a concept captures a crucial aspect of his artistic approach, in which he takes preexisting objects from lived reality as the starting point for a set of actions that unfold, displacing initial meanings and functions.

Drawn to the varied cultural associations of Los Angeles, where he has lived and worked since 2002, Golia has produced a vast number of artworks inspired by or situated in the city itself. For example, Luminous Sphere (2010), a five-foot-tall orb installed on the roof of West Hollywood’s Standard Hotel, is only illuminated when the artist is in town; like a sacred presence expressed in LA vernacular, the mysterious cipher awaits projection of meaning from the casual passerby unaware of what drives its pattern of illumination. “It’s a form open to urban legend,” the artist muses. Golia frequently operates outside the traditional parameters of studio practice, often producing situations that aim to elicit an intuitive and spontaneous response from his viewers through theatrical, conceptual gestures. In 2013 he opened Chalet, an underground Hollywood speakeasy (later restaged as Chalet Dallas at the Nasher Sculpture Center in 2015) that was conceived as a space combining architecture, entertainment, and art.

Since 2017 Golia has developed new projects that explore social networks and retain traces of prior circumstances. At Art Basel in 2017, he realized the kinetic sculpture The Painter, which featured a robot programmed to paint abstract geometric forms onto eight large canvases whenever movement In the exhibition space was detected. The resulting Basel Paintings (2017) retain visual evidence of the process of their own making.

Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Henrik Håkansson (b. 1968, Sweden) resides in Berlin. His works involve the observing and recording of natural ecosystems and microcosms, and their reconstitution in the gallery both literally and spatially by means of videography. Håkansson addresses (natural) cycles, which are the symbolic subjects of his work, and are embedded within it on a physical level. These fragments of nature, which the artist transfers into a cultural context, result in almost surreal spatial ensembles and situations. Culture and nature are simultaneously understood as reference, result, and essence. His provocative sequences function as a subtle dialogue between man, nature, and space; plants, living beings, and their mutability through light, temperature, time, or unnatural external influences define the shape of his work, and are also its conceptual theme.

Håkansson’s work has been shown in solo exhibitions in international public and private Institutions, including KODE (2019), Fondazione Morra Greco, Kunstverein Freiburg (2016), Swedish Institute(2015), and many more. He has also taken part in many group exhibitions internationally, and has participated in biennials and international exhibitions including 11th Taipei Biennial, Taipei, Taiwan (2018), 19th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia (2014), documenta 13, Kassel, Germany (2012), and 4th Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama, Japan (2011).

Natalie Jeremijenko (b. 1966, Australia) is an artist and engineer. She is an Officer of the Order of Australia awarded in 2018 by the governor-general on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II for “distinguished service to the arts, and to higher education as an academic, through pioneering contributions to architecture, technology, the sciences, and engineering, and to rural and urban design.” Jeremijenko directs the Environmental Health Clinic International, a network of colaboratories addressing the external determinants of health. She is founding Director of Design Engineering at the Museum of Natural Futures, an initiative to develop shared infrastructures that improve human and environmental health. She is also associate professor in the Visual Art Department at NYU.

Jeremijenko’s artworks have been included in two Whitney Biennials, MOMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Reina Sofia museum, MACBA, and CCCB among many others. Her public art installations include “Tree Logic” at MASSMoCA; “OneTrees” in the San Francisco Bay Area; “TREExOFFICEs” in London and Berlin; Amphibious Architecture in East River, NYC, and Derwent River Tasmania; and “Urban Space Station (USS)” at Emscherkunst in Dortmund. Solo retrospectives have been produced by the Neuberger Museum of Art and the Cummings Center for the Arts at Connecticut College.

Photo: courtesy of the artist.

Rashid Johnson (b. 1977, United States) employs a wide range of media to explore themes of art history, individual and shared cultural identities, personal narratives, literature, philosophy, materiality, and critical history. Johnson’s practice embraces sculpture, painting, drawing, filmmaking, and installation—yielding a complex multidisciplinary practice that incorporates diverse materials rich with symbolism. He is known for his narrative embedding of these everyday materials and objects and for his references to the collective aspects of African American intellectual history and cultural identity. Many of Johnson’s works convey rhythms of the occult and mystic: evoking his desire to transform and expand each included object’s field of association.

Johnson was one of six artists commissioned to create a site-specific, permanent installation for La Guardia Airport. In 2021, he presented a major solo exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, as well as large-scale artworks commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. A major outdoor sculpture by Johnson was installed in 2021 at Storm King Art Center, New York. Johnson has been the subject of several solo exhibitions as well as notable group exhibitions. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Cerith Wyn Evans’ (b. 1958, UK) conceptual practice explores the way that ideas can be communicated through form, incorporating a diverse range of media including installation, sculpture, photography, film, and text. He began his career as a filmmaker producing short, experimental films and collaborative works, but since the 1990s has created artworks that deal with language and perception, focusing with precise clarity on their manifestation in space. Evans employs strategies of exhibition making that are often site-specific, viewing exhibitions as a catalyst to produce a reservoir of possible meanings and experiences.

Evans has exhibited at Aspen Art Museum (2021), Pirelli HangarBicocca (2019), Museo Tamayo(2018), Tate Britain (2017), Museion (2015), The Serpentine Gallery (2014), and more. He has participated in the 57th Venice Biennale (2017), 4th Moscow Biennale (2011), 12th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2010), and other international exhibitions. In 2018 Evans won the Hepworth Wakefield Prize for Sculpture with his monumental work Composition for 37 Flutes, 2018.

Cerith Wyn Evans photo by Ali Janka.