From Michelangelo’s Renaissance-era scenes from Eden to Monet’s 19th century landscapes, the garden has been a focal point to centuries of art movements.
But what happens when rather than simply depicting gardens, artists try gardening themselves?
A new triennial at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum in Denmark hopes to explore exactly this through a three-part exhibition that looks at the past, the present and the future.
“The Garden – End of Times; Beginning of Time,” will be staged in venues in an around Aarhus, with some installations stationed the coast as far as five miles out of the city.
“When they look upon nature, (artists) see the possibility but also the challenges in a different way than we would,” said Erlend Hoyersten, the director of ARoS.
“It’s not just the visuality of nature, it’s the question of what exactly is nature and what is man-made because we tend to forget the difference between the two. Driving though Denmark we have fields of wheat and different kinds of crops growing and it feels like nature but it’s actually green industry.”
Though the city only has a population of just over 300,000, Hoyersten anticipates visitors in excess of 1.1 million due to the subject’s universality.
“Everybody has an opinion of what nature is or what a garden is,” he said.
“You have an attitude towards it, you have an experience with it.”