I was in Vienna last week to do a lecture as part of an exhibition on plant breeding as an art form. One of those events which displays the city's imaginative thinking and creativity at its best. Check out their website:http://www.landscapewithflowers.net/ - most of the entries on the website are bilingual German/English. It is interesting, beautiful and well-worth looking at in some detail.
Its not often that plant breeding is defined as an art. Here it is explored as such through both the exhibition, at the Vienna Botanic Garden and on the website and through some imaginative, almost whacky artworks. A painting by two artists and landscape designers - Anita Duller and Hannah Stippl merges with a planting in a downtown gallery which includes both real and plastic flowers both inside the gallery and immediately outside in a window box. Hannah (also the exhibition curator) and Anita have run workshops in London at last year's Chelsea Fringe where they get people to paint and then create plantings based on the paintings.
Their website is:
http://theflowerbeds.com
The opening event at the Botanic Gardens featured edible flower jelly (very Vienna) while the gallery includes a small petunia plant which contains a gene from an artist. In a country where attitudes to GM food are amongst the most hostile (and quite honestly most irrational) I would have expected the place to be bombarded with protesting biodynamic eco-warriors. But not a bit of it - no-one has objected - progress indeed!
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