The exhibition Artificial Biotopes unites works by Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881 – 1919), Georg Kolbe (1877 - 1947) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886 – 1969) and juxtaposes them with an installation by contemporary artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan (*1978). Beginning June 10, the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin will thus illustrate »the fruitful relationship between architecture, sculpture, and nature«: processes of growth and transience, which the sculptures of modernism sought to illustrate, enter into a dialogue with the architecture of the time, which made use of feedback from nature. The installation on view by Anne Duk Hee Jordan revisits the exhibition's theme in a contemporary discourse. In her so-called Environments, Jordan brings together natural materials with motorized objects to create symbioses of the organic and the man-made – she thus »subverts the clear boundaries of nature and culture.«
The sculptures by Lehmbruck and Kolbe presented in the exhibition combine the novel image of man with which the two sculptors reformulated existential human questions. Mies van der Rohe's »aesthetically thought-out organisms« from the 1920s in the form of functional architectures contribute their part to Artificial Biotopes. The focus here is on his figurative sculptures, with which he was considered an exception in the field of architecture at his time. The exhibition is the result of a cooperation with the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, which already presented its counterpart last year. It will end at the Kolbe Museum in Berlin on August 28.
