Helmut Schweizer. Nature[continues]

Duration: April 24 to July 12, 2026

The exhibition presents a comprehensive retrospective of the work of Düsseldorf-based artist Helmut Schweizer, with a special focus on his experimental plant images. In these works, Schweizer preserves plants in sealed plastic film, thereby making processes of growth, change, and decay visible over the course of decades.

On display is a concentrated selection spanning five decades of artistic creation. Schweizer’s plant images capture striking snapshots—they tell of nature’s unbridled forces and destruction, of scientific progress, of danger and hope. Hardly any other artist of his generation has so consistently linked biochemical, physical, and nuclear aspects of nature with aesthetic reflection.

Born in 1946, Schweizer belongs to a generation whose view of nature and progress was shaped by defining historical events—from the atomic catastrophes in Hiroshima to Chernobyl, as well as the ecological challenges of the present. Since the 1970s, he has explored nature as both a creative and a destructive force.

His unusual method—sealing plants in transparent polyethylene film rather than pressing or drying them—led to experimental herbaria that, over the course of decades,