FLORA, FAUNA AND OTHER FORMS OF LIFE

For summer, Michael Werner Gallery, London is pleased to present Flora, Fauna and Other Forms of Life, a group exhibition which includes important works by Hans Arp, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Enrico David, Willem de Kooning, Peter Doig, Jörg Immendorff, Per Kirkeby, Paul Klee, Eugène Leroy, Markus Lüpertz, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, A.R. Penck, Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke, Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern, Kurt Schwitters and Don Van Vliet.

Depictions of man and his environment are our oldest and most persistent iconographic forms. Through a selection of major paintings, sculptures and works on paper spanning nearly a century, Flora, Fauna and Other Forms of Life offers a diverse sampling of the ways in which artists across generations have interpreted naturalistic imagery. Whether in service to narrative or as the departure point for abstraction, visual expression drawn from nature is the inescapable DNA of the works on view. Metamorphosis and hybridism emerge as recurring motifs in the exhibition, from the grotesque actors in the drawings of Schröder-Sonnenstern to Enrico David's amorphous bodies. Important works by Baselitz, Immendorff, Lüpertz, Penck and Van Vliet elucidate this theme. The confluence of landscape and abstraction proves equally fertile territory, notably in works by Kirkeby, Leroy and Nay. Ostensibly more traditional interpretations of natural motifs are evident in the paintings of Doig, Picabia and Schwitters, while classic works by Arp, Beuys, de Kooning, Klee and Polke deepen our understanding of the complex relationship between depiction and invention.