Constructed Nature - Exhibition

Venue: Kaiserliche Stallungen Bad Ischl/ Access via Götz-Straße Date: 11.06–31.10.26 Time: Curator's Guided Tour with Sara Tröster Klemm Thu, 11.06.26, 16:00 | Sat, 31.10.26, 16:00

Nature is often regarded as the opposite of culture – as something original and untouched. Yet this distinction has long fallen short: today, nature is observed, measured, used, protected, threatened. And staged. It no longer appears as an immediate given, but exists in a state of constant mediation. This is where the exhibition Constructed Nature comes in. The animal depictions by Dana Meyer, Nelly Schmücking, and Matthias Garff present the animal not as a mere motif, but as an interlocutor. It becomes a mirror of our perception and our responsibility toward the living world. The exhibition venue Bad Ischl amplifies this enquiry. The scenically idyllic Salzkammergut is simultaneously a natural and a cultural space, historically shaped by use, aestheticization, and appropriation – visible, for instance, in the Kaiservilla with its hunting trophies. Nature here always appears as a designed and interpreted reality as well. The three artistic positions make this construction visible in different ways: Meyer's steel sculptures combine hardness with living tension, Schmücking's works condense anatomical precision into an aesthetic "equivalent" of the animal, and Garff creates fragile, haunting creatures of a human-shaped environment from found objects. A space emerges in which the relationship between humans and animals is renegotiated. Constructed Nature shows: nature is not a counterworld outside of us, but always part of a cultural fabric – and therefore also an expression of our responsibility for the world we help shape. Curated by Sara Tröster Klemm