Material Nature

From early carved reliefs to ink landscape traditions and European photography, artists have repeatedly turned to nature as a way of testing materials, techniques, and modes of seeing. Natural forms often operate less as symbols than as working structures—sites where surface, scale, time, and process can be examined through making. Within this context, trees and related natural systems recur not as motifs, but as frameworks for thinking about material transformation and interconnection.

Material Nature is a collaboration between Galerie J.J. Heckenhauer and The Modern Language Experiment, bringing together German- and UK-based artists whose practices engage directly with questions of materiality. Across drawing, photography, sculpture, and text-based work, the exhibition considers how nature is constructed through material decisions, and how different media shape what is perceived, recorded, or inferred.

Peter Neusser presents a multiple-exposure photograph with painterly qualities, where layered imagery destabilises photographic realism and shifts the work toward abstraction. Danja Akulin shows drawings that draw on photographic properties—light, exposure, and tonal compression—while remaining resolutely hand-made. In contrast, Warren Garland applies ink drawing to concrete surfaces, creating tension between graphic mark-making and architectural material. Tina Hage combines photographic paper with steel, collapsing distinctions between image, object, and support. Klaus Weber contributes spore prints of the sidewalk mushroom (Agaricus bitorquis)—organisms known for their role in underground communication networks between trees—introducing questions of interdependence, invisibility, and exchange within natural systems.

In the foyer, Keh Ng and Matthew Stock present a collaborative, text-based video work that unfolds as a conversation. The piece reflects on trees, language, and knowledge systems, positioning text itself as a material through which nature is interpreted and negotiated.

Together, the works in Material Nature resist a singular image of the natural world. Instead, they propose nature as something produced through material processes—fragmented, mediated, and continuously re-formed through artistic practice.