Exhibition preview: Simone Nieweg – Plants, Sheds, Arable Land. Working in Nature

Simone Nieweg: Gartenhaus (mit Teppichfliesen), Meldorf 1986 © Simone Nieweg/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

September 8, 2023 – January 21, 2024

For Simone Nieweg (*1962), a master student of Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, the view of nature and the areas made usable by man was already the starting point of her artistic work in the 1980s. Even then, pressing questions about how to deal with our natural resources were in the background. With her color photographs, which she takes in the Rhineland, in several regions of Germany and in France with the large-format camera, she draws attention to the often overlooked peripheral areas of our towns and industrial areas and shows what aesthetics emerge when these still unplanned places are used in a limited way, usually on one's own initiative, for gardening or agriculture. The artist captures what gives structure and continuity to the land: alternative allotments, grazing land, pieces of meadow, fields turning into wild growth, vegetable beds, plowed fields in winter or blossoming fruit trees as harbingers of spring. Buildings erected with simple means, be they sheds or compost racks, can also be discovered as typical elements of her landscapes.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication of the same name published by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag.