A cultural history of nature may sound like a paradox, but a second glance proves it to be a clever theme. For though we are used to perceiving nature and culture as opposites, they are actually closely interwoven. This is precisely what Klaus Littman shows us in his startling project Tree Connections. In 2019, around three hundred trees were planted in the pitch at the Woerthersee football stadium in Klagenfurt. The result is the extraordinary experience of witnessing a confrontation between two otherwise strictly separate kinds of spaces. Blending the natural and the constructed worlds blurs their boundaries, making them practically indistinguishable. At the same time, the breathtaking views of this unique project offer fascinating insights into our current, unecological ideas and activities. An exhibition curated by Littmann will take place at the Basel H. Geiger Kulturstiftung starting in May 2021, featuring works by Alexandre Calame, Joseph Beuys, Christo, Jannis Kounellis, Giuseppe Penone, Gunther Uecker, Tony Cragg, Michael Sailstorfer, Miriam Cahn, and Sol LeWitt, among others.

The need for the portrayal of the individual identity is not a modern invention: the idealization of the sitter was already a matter of course in eighteenth and nineteenth century portrait painting. In the exhibition, contemporary portraits are juxtaposed with this convention from an earlier era. What is revealed is a timelessness of the genre, as well as pictoral evidence of social rejection in contemporary portrait painting: loneliness, shattered states, physical and emotional abuse. The exhibition at the Museum Langmatt compares the different epochs and searches for the conventions of contemporary self-portrayal. Portraits by such artists such as Jean-Honore Fragonard, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir enter into dialogue with internationally renowned contemporary artists like Michael Borremans, Marlene Dumas, and Luc Tuymans.Exhibition: 17.9.-10.12.2017, Museum Langmatt, Baden