The central theme of the exhibition I lived with a sunflower for 130 days by Romanian artist Stefan Bertalan is nature, in particular the growth of plants, but also the anatomy of animals (insects), the structure of stones, shells and minerals, the topology of landscapes, the movement of clouds and winds or the determination of astronomical bodies and cosmological relationships.
The group exhibition Plants_Intelligence with works by Sabian Baumann, Ursula Damm, Kyriaki Goni, Ingela Ihrman, Jochen Lempert (invited by Christiane Meyer-Stoll), Julia Mensch, Mathilde Rosier, Una Szeemann and Zheng Bo in the atrium of the Kunstverein follows on from Stefan Bertalan's radical appreciation of plants. All of the contemporary artistic positions on display understand plants as powerful beings, as companions and relatives of humans, and make this clear using different artistic methods.