“His fascinatingly surreal plant-animal hybrids combine beauty and transience, body and sexuality. The result is an oeuvre that – as timeless as it is anachronistic – unites truth and invention, life and death.”
Philip Demandt, Flesh For Fantasy, exh. cat., Städel Museum, Hatje Cantz, 2023
Miron Schmückle spent his youth in Romania, where his parents introduced him to classical art in museums. He even happened to write a thesis on Georg Hoefnagel (1542-1601), a Mannerist painter and illuminator. Schmückle‘s only creative escape was therefore to invent in painting an imaginary garden inspired by the classical culture he had acquired. The young artist notably drew inspiration from Hoefnagel, a master of tangled plant life, undulating mythological figures and grotesque, to bring the fleshy and vegetal worlds into dialogue in his work.
This dialogue between the human and plant worlds becomes the common thread binding all the artist’s work. In the photographs of the Hortus conclusus series, created in 2009, the artist’s nude bust and cut flowers seem to be in a mutual state of intimate communion.
In today’s works, the plant world has completely overrun the image with its luxuriant power. The artist’s virtuosity and the Latin titles of his sophisticated works arouse the viewers’ curiosity about these mysterious plants, fooling them into believing that they are what they are not. Hidden behind apparent botanical illustrations, the beauty of nature reveals itself to be the fruit of the artist’s pure imagination. Miron Schmückle invents an artificial life made of flowers, vines, leaves and fruit that do not belong to the Earth. In fact, these plants are rarely green and are rootless; and their iridescence, gradations and certain shapes are more reminiscent of animal flesh. Membranes and vessels can be seen, and the evocation of sexual organs is never very distant. It seems as if the vegetal world might have absorbed the human. These flowers are poisonous because they are beautiful, attractive and they instill doubt about their true nature.
Miron Schmückle’s works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany and abroad, and are included in numerous European and American public and private collections. His last major solo exhibition, Flesh for Fantasy, was held at Frankfurt’s Städel Museum from December 1st, 2023 to April 14, 2024.
Miron Schmückle was born in 1966 in Sibiu, Romania, and currently lives and works in Berlin. His preoccupation with the study of nature, flora and fauna form the starting point for his work in painting and photography. From 1991 to 1996, he studied at the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts in Kiel (Germany). In 1994, he took part in a Marina Abramovic course at the HFBK in Hamburg. In 2014, he created the sets and costumes for La flûte enchantée and Othello in 2017, both directed by Patrick Schlösser for the Stadttheater Klagenfurt. In 2016, after studying the cabinet miniatures of Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1600), he received his doctorate in from the Institute of Art Studies at the Muthesius – Kunsthochschule in Kiel.
