Berlin-based Brazilian Luzia Simons is a pioneer in the development of the scannogram - a fledgling digital media technique that combines elements of painting and photography. The result of her work, however, can be classified as neither one nor the other.
The artist, who lived and worked in Stuttgart for many years, came to Germany via her studies in Paris, where she devoted herself to cultural exchange and migration issues. She became famous for her monumental depictions of tulips, which are inspired by the Golden Age of Dutch painting. The works are irritatingly beautiful, not only because of the floral motifs, but essentially because of the compositional staging, the opulence of the content, and the technique behind it - Simons herself speaks of "Digital Baroque." The juxtaposition of the optically scanned dots allows for an area-wide depth of field that cannot be produced photographically. Moreover, the composition follows less the laws of panel painting than of reverse glass painting, which unsettles the viewer: Since the flowers or plants are draped on the scanner, the artist has to work from the bottom up, that is, in the result from back to front. Unlike most still life artists of our time, Luzia Simons also makes a social, cultural-historical claim: the image memories - this is how one must interpret the works from the series "Stockage" - collect information about certain plants, which act as ambassadors in the "transfer through the various cultures," according to Simons. This connects the plant motifs, whether they come from the diverse forms of the tulip or chrysanthemum species, which are known to have distant roots: Once cultivated in the Orient, the flower prized as the "Dutch" tulip, for example, came to Europe comparatively late, only to become the epitome of a burgeoning trade and subsequent economic crash. The fact that the exuberant bloom and vital vegetation is juxtaposed with the morbid side of transience is a tribute to reality and life - and at the same time a reflection of the notion of vanitas, which shaped thinking in the 17th century in particular. Luzia Simons allows the imagination to create spaces in which the viewer can stroll without boundaries and oblivious to time.