Exhibition

The Dr. Éva Kahán Foundation is pleased to present a solo exhibition of the Berlin-based artist Andreas Greiner (1979, Aachen) at their most recently opened branch, Kahán Art Space Vienna. 

Greiner’s work revolves around the sculptural qualities of biological processes while playing with the boundaries of form. Since 2018, he has worked with forests in particular as both an artistic theme and medium, challenging the traditional nature/culture dichotomy and leading him to cooperate with experts such as biologists, art historians, programmers, architects and musicians over the course of his career.

By incorporating living beings as subjects in his work and questioning our conception of ‘sculpture’, Greiner blurs the edges of art and science while probing the nature of the relationship between man and the natural world.  His exhibition in Kahán Art Space Vienna is an investigation of the possibilities of cooperation between ecology and technology when engaging with themes of climate change and the extinction of species, while also seeking to explore novel frameworks of understanding in what he refers to as ‘archeology of the future’.

In Jungle Memory, Greiner presents a new series of works made with the aid of artificial intelligence. As the result of the artist’s most recent projects concerning large-scale forest die-offs in Goslar, Harz National Park, Hambach Forst and the Bislowieza Forest, Greiner has an archive of several thousand photographs that he took himself and fed them into a deep-learning program in order to derive algorithmic projections – the ‘idea’ of a forest – from a computer. The result is a flipping of the traditional landscape genre for the contemporary age, a sort of “digital hallucination”, which examines Romantic-era ideas of sublimity as well as the autonomy of mankind in creative production.

The exhibition as a whole presents itself as an interwoven story of highly inter-dependent threads – a multitude of economic, historical, technological facets that come together to ‘read’ as an inquiry into the post-modern condition: what can art do in the face of stark reminders of global warming and mass extinction?

Lastly, as part of the artist’s desire for critical self-analysis and disclosure of his own ecological footprint, a hanging beech (fagus sylvatica pendula) will be planted in Vienna’s Augarten in cooperation with the Vienna Biennale for Change 2021 and the Federal Gardens of Vienna. The tree – which Greiner refers to as a “living sculpture” – is given a human name in order to question the conception of human/non-human relationships while also alluding to the man-made separation between cultural artefacts and natural entities.

Andreas Greiner

Andreas Greiner (*1979 in Aachen, lives and works in Berlin) works with time-based and living sculptures that contain including dynamic and uncontrollable variables, often extending the classical parameters of sculpture. His work focuses on the influence of anthropogenic interventions in the form and evolution of "nature". He is part of the artist collectives A / A and Das Numen.