In the new presentation at the Kunstverein, Berlin-based artist Nathan Peter continues his long-standing engagement with vegetal fragments as a process of continuous transformation.
Working at the edges of legibility within botanical image worlds, floral motifs are layered, reorganized, and dissected until they oscillate between recognizability and dissolution. What becomes visible is the instability of the image of nature, as his interventions do not dissect nature itself, but rather its visual manifestations. In this way, his works unfold through gestures of erosion and reconstruction, in which images appear and simultaneously seem to dissolve again. Surface and structure remain in constant motion, while motif, repetition, and abstraction seamlessly interpenetrate, destabilizing fixed distinctions between figure and ground as well as between image and space.
Within the installation, painting expands into a permeable spatial condition: the canvas acts less as a static support than as a porous body that absorbs, disperses, and reformulates visual information. What takes shape is not a singular image, but an ongoing process of becoming and unmaking, is painting understood as simultaneously generative and unstable.
The installation will be on view 24/7.
At the same time, Lennard Lahuis opens In All Weathers.
Nathan Peter, monstera, 2023, (cropped) Courtesy of the artist and PSM, Berlin, image: Eric Tschernow
