Angela M. Flaig’s unusual working material consists of seeds from plants such as dandelion, thistle or willowherb that grow wild and tend to be considered as undesirable weeds.
It was her investigation of “signs of life” that led Flaig to discover this organic material for her work in the 1990s. She collects the material herself in the immediate vicinity of her home in Rottweil-Hausen, gathering it in fields, meadows and forests before returning to her studio to sort and organise the day’s bounty. The seeds of different plants are kept strictly separate. In each of her series, the artist focuses on a single species of plant.
Using her material conceptually and combining the pared-back approaches of Arte Povera and Minimal Art – the use of simple materials from nature and the serial arrangement of individual seeds or, alternatively, the agglomeration of countless seeds into painterly colour fields, bowls or basic geometric forms – she creates works that are serene and at the same time highly charged, simple and at the same time incredibly complex, works in which nature and artifice, the inventiveness of nature and mankind come together in a uniquely striking way. |
