Plants

Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition of Simone Nieweg’s photographs. In her second solo exhibition at Gallery Luisotti, Nieweg presents an inspiring array of photographs documenting the natural and agrarian landscape. Known for her images of communal gardens and rural farmlands, Nieweg’s recent photographs blur the boundary between natural landscape and cultivated land, leaving the viewer with an enticing image of rural space.

Simone Nieweg was a student of Bernd Becher’s Master class at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the 1990s. Though her work shares her peers typological method, Simone Nieweg’s photographs are notable for their precise handling of nature’s subtle colors, the purposeful use of scale, and a dexterous treatment of visual perspective. Unlike many of her peers, though, Nieweg does not focus her camera on the most evident forms of cultural expression. Ignoring the certain signs of urban and suburban culture, Nieweg takes us to a landscape of cultivation. In her images of gardens, farmlands, and other arable plots, Nieweg attenuates the balance between culture and nature.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in her recent work. Discovering gardens and farmlands that often have an improvised quality, Nieweg’s recent photographs picture liminal spaces between cultured, arable land, and arcadian sites in nature. Here fruit trees merge with forests, sunflowers mix with meadows, and cultivable flowers grow amongst untamed fields. In other instances, boundaries become more pronounced – a roadway lying against a field of wheat, or a plot of red beets is cut against grassland. In all cases, Nieweg places us (the viewers) in perspectives where these boundaries between the natural and cultural are both reinforced at the same time they are erased. Similarly, the scale of the images and the plants they depict compete for our visual experience, furthering Nieweg’s efforts to exploit the increasingly indefinite line between cultivated and undomesticated places.