Mathias Kessler

As part of Big Botany, the Spencer Museum’s major exhibition that explores humankind’s deep connections and fascinations with the plant kingdom, Austrian artist Mathias Kessler will visit the Museum to create site-specific artwork. In 2011, Kessler, with the help of Dr. Wendelin Weingartner, developed an installation called After Nature, in which plants’ stress symptoms were converted to and communicated through sound. For Big Botany, Kessler will create an updated and re-envisioned version of his After Nature installation in a greenhouse located outside the Museum’s front entrance.

Kessler earned an MFA in Art Practice from New York’s School of Visual Arts. His ambitious conceptual art often draws on landscape and other elements of the natural world and especially the complex and sometimes discordant coexistence of humans and nature. Kessler’s work has been internationally exhibited in both group and solo shows. Some of his recent solo exhibitions include Here and Now, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Holland; Artifacts & Other Errors of Perception + Cultural Cul-de-Sac, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, Colorado; Simulacrum – Virtuelle Welten, Palmengarten, Frankfurt, Germany; California Dreaming, Site:Lab, Grand Rapids, Michigan; I’ll Survive, Rosphot National Museum for Photography, Russia; After Nature, GL Holtegaard Museum, Denmark; The Taste of Discovery, Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria.