BERLIN.- Camera Work Gallery is presenting the new series and exhibition Flora by Christian Tagliavini for the first time worldwide. The works offer a unique experience within the exhibition. The visual opulence of the pieces is complemented by additional sensory stimuli, creating a contemplative and gracious atmosphere. This setting allows the works from the Flora series to provide insight into Christian Tagliavini’s new distinctive artistic vision.

With his previous world-renowned series, Christian Tagliavini explored themes and aesthetics rooted in historical epochs. In Flora, the artist turns his gaze for the first time toward the immediate present and future. The works focus on the origin of all life, from which the beauty of forms and colors unfolds. As is typical for Christian Tagliavini, every visual element in these elaborate pieces was meticulously conceived and designed by the artist himself. This contemplative, deliberate creative process enhances the impact of the works.

In addition to his photographic creations, Christian Tagliavini has, for the first time, created sculptures inspired by the Flora series. Under the title Bakero, these unique pieces are a three-dimensional realization of his creative vision and play a significant role within the Flora works. Each Bakerosculpture has been crafted with painstaking care and handwork.

Artist Statement

With the new series Flora, Christian Tagliavini meditates about the future and inverts the arrow of time, compared to his previous works. Because Flora is about seeds. And seeds are an almost-future: they contain it in potentia.

Tagliavini’s future features a spectrum of golden, luminous shades. This future may be warm or even torrid, who knows. It’s evoked by nine female figures associated with nine sets of botanical items and special examples of coleoptera. The women are managing and gestating these items – they do guard them. We see points, curls, wings, layers, spikes, stems, spirals, spores. And we may guess cinorrhoda, corymbs, cotyledons, plumulas, petals, pollens and pollinators.

It’s an imaginary, visionary nature, diverse and biodiverse, hand-crafted by the artist down to the smallest detail fully using his artisan intelligence, and the art of photography. However, this diversity seems somehow organic and familiar to us. Even those figures, smooth and beautiful, are different from each other. We are contemplating a wonderful genetic treasure before its destiny.

Such a treasure, that all of the subjects have scientific binomials. These names are coined in a reinvented Latin which resonates with some modern idioms, as it contains them as well.

Flora – seeding a future – is a new artist’s visual introspection contrasting his own experiences with the inexorable march of time and pollinating a fertile future.