Nils-Udo

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Art in Nature

Nils-Udo

Synopsis:
Nils-Udo embarked on his artistic career as a painter but he rapidly turned his attention from the canvas to the environment. As such, he is one of the early exponents of land or environmental art, the resonance of which has become increasingly felt over the past few decades. As the technological world increases its hold on everyday life, Nils-Udo returns again and again to nature, in a thoughtful dialogue that requires us to reconsider our relationship with our natural surroundings.

He creates structures within a given natural site that serve to highlight the presence of nature: he plants entire fields of wildflowers, constructs giant nests, plants rows of saplings, hangs curtains of flowers from manmade structures, and installs miniature landscapes on artificially raised platforms.

The artist's documents and photographs of his work, reproduced in the current volume, do not aim to defeat their ephemeral nature. Instead they serve as a poignant reminder of the extent to which the whole of our natural environment risks becoming, in the face of modern civilization, just that-ephemeral.

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Other editions: 2002, 1999