ATAK: the garden in a book

At 5pm today, artist ATAK is introducing his new book, Der Garten, 32 pages of his paintings about the garden. “The garden breathes time and time breathes as a garden. I go to the garden in the evenings to breathe,” he says.

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Berlin-Neukölln: Kindergarten garden

Some of Berlin’s best windows are Kindergarten windows. Unlike the kindergarten denoted by US English, which is part of primary school, a German Kindergarten or Kindertagestätte (Kita for short) is a pre-school day care. If the windows are any indication, a major part of Kindergarten here is decorating the rooms with cheery plants and animals—putting the Garten in Kindergarten and more urban plants on our sidewalks.

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Holland (17th century): Looking at the ground with sottobosco painting

Continuing our look at plants on the ground, let’s look a bit further back into art history then we usually do here at UPR. In the 17th century, Dutch painter Otto Marseus von Schrieck wasn’t exactly doing urban plant research already, but he was doing something very new, which was to take the close-up, observant approach of the still life painter and direct it outside, and downwards, to create nature studies that were carefully arranged but were set on the dark, damp stage of the forest floor, as in the above Still Life with Amphibians and Insects (Herzog-Anton-Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig). The result is called sottobosco painting (after the Italian for “undergrowth”), or in German, Waldstilleben (forest still life). And it’s mesmerizing.

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