Georgia Creimer

Brigitte Huck, from the magazine Kunstforum – Das Gartenarchiv, vol. 146, p.70

Recently, the Vienna-based Brazilian artist Georgia Creimer presented a work series in the name of the rose at the Galerie & Edition Artelier in Graz. At the formal level the three artworks – “Blume” [Flower] (1996), “Second Nature” (1998) and “Garten” [Garden] (1999) – at first share an ambiguous play on relationships between art and nature: abstract-constructive sculptures duel with leaf and bloom, bare stereometries stage the luxuriance, charm and sensuality of the floristics.



The Multiple “Blume” is presented in a box lined out luxuriously with velvet. The instructions (Creimer/Dusini) stipulate the mounting of the Plexiglas base with a concave mirror at a fixed height, the purchase of a readymade (flower pot), to be placed in front of the mirror and regularly watered. The fact that it is a question of perception here becomes clear at the latest when looking into the concave mirror: while the flowers stand upright because of the “correct” distance, the viewer himself or herself topples head over heels. A puzzle with the “know thyself” of the Delphic Oracle, a roller coaster between being and appearance.



For the installative ground work “Garten” [Garden], Georgia Creimer applies the principle of communicating containers. Plastic tubes connect white synthetic-resin balls with a source of water that keeps the yellow roses alive – organic sculptures stuck into the balls. The system allows for a hybrid growth of the elements which can branch out ad infinitum from a minimal formation of three. Bordering at irony and sincerity, chance and order, artificial and natural, Creimer invests in a playful experiment with the fusion of opposites.



Finally, in “Second Nature” the artist trivialises the sublime in nature. These are black-and-white photos of individual blooms and grasses that have been spread out dramatically on pedestals: symbols of beauty and transience. The pictures are mounted on flexible aluminium rods, with a fan providing a spring wind and making them dance. It is the decadent flowers of evil that Creimer gets to wave helplessly: the punchy assemblage could also be called “rock my horticulture” and is a characteristic example of Georgia Creimer’s artistic practice of orientating herself on life itself and with a light hand arranging reality as an artefact. For each task she finds the individual, specific and unused form of representation as in the present case the radical chic of “Nature Vivante”.