What space can nature, sculpture and architecture create in art? What kind of living society emerges when organic processes are the creative force? And which biological forms can be translated into aesthetics? Our new exhibition Artificial Biotopes combines the works of Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Georg Kolbe with the architectural ideas of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan responds to the current question of the relationship between humans and nature with an installation created for the Georg Kolbe Museum. In addition to architectural, installation, and sculptural works - such as Kolbe's famous work The Morning - numerous photographs will also be on view.

The exhibition Artificial Biotopes explores the fruitful relationship between architecture, sculpture, and nature in their energetic interplay, and in doing so, explores a life question that connected Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Georg Kolbe, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. "I demand from the architect not wall space, but space," was one of Kolbe's instructions during the construction of his Sensburg, now the Georg Kolbe Museum. The architect Ernst Rentsch also described the functionality of the garden at the time as an open-air studio: "The walls are interrupted by high wide windows in order to be able to relate all the works created in the space to the outer surrounding nature." This free design idea, which also describes the museum itself as an artificial biotope, can be transferred into the concept of art of the three protagonists of the exhibition: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe developed a radically modern architectural language in the 1920s that had a broad international impact. In his main European work, sculptures by Lehmbruck and Kolbe function simultaneously as independent sculptures and as elements of an organism of space, light, material, water, and plants. With their figurative sculptures, the sculptors Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881-1919) and Georg Kolbe (1877-1947) created an image of man that sought new forms for existential human questions. The leveling of art into an organic totality now creates in the exhibition Artificial Biotopes a dialogue between figurative sculpture and natural architecture.

An installation by artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan (b. 1978), a master student of Olafur Eliasson, transposes the exhibition's theme into a contemporary discourse of man and nature: In her installation created for the Georg Kolbe Museum, plant-based systems meet contemporary materials such as colored acrylic glass and sheet copper. By playfully taking up the legacy of classical modernism and also critically questioning it, she points to the fragility of the living and the limits of planetary growth. In the spirit of Donna Haraway's "naturecultures," she imagines a world in which various agents beyond the human interact, and the organic enters into a new community of life with the artificially created.