The exhibition Botanischer Wahnsinn in the Kröller-Müller Museum shows how artists from different genres deal with nature. The name of the exhibition refers to a desperate exclamation by the German visual artist Joseph Beuys when he was looking for a very rare plant (Japanese dwarf rhododendron) on a large meadow in Canada, but could not find it.
Unlike Beuys, the Dutch visual artist herman de vries found what he was looking for. He collected plants and other finds from plant expeditions around his hometown and created the monumental Eschenauer Journal. It consists of plants of different textures and color tones in picture frames that fill an entire wall.
Gemma Anderson, an artist and researcher from Northern Ireland, invented ‘isomorphology’: a research method that compares the common shapes of animals, minerals and plants – with idiosyncratic scientific illustrations like the one opposite.