Constructed Nature – Exhibition

Date: 11.06–31.10.26 Venue: Kaiserliche Stallungen Bad Ischl / Access via Götz-Straße Curator's 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 primal and untouched. Yet this distinction has long since fallen short. Today, nature is observed, measured, used, protected, threatened. And staged. It no longer appears as an immediate given, but rather exists in a state of constant mediation. This is where the exhibition *Constructed Nature* takes its starting point.

The animal depictions by Dana Meyer, Nelly Schmücking, and Matthias Garff present the animal not as a mere motif, but as an counterpart. It becomes a mirror of our perception and our responsibility toward the living.

The exhibition venue Bad Ischl intensifies this questioning. The scenically idyllic Salzkammergut is simultaneously a natural and cultural space, historically shaped by use, aestheticization, and appropriation – visible, for instance, in the Kaiservilla with its hunting trophies. Here, nature always appears as a shaped and interpreted reality.

The three artistic positions reveal this construction 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 from found objects – inhabitants of an environment shaped by humans. A space emerges in which the relationship between humans and animals is renegotiated.

*Constructed Nature* shows that nature is not a counterworld outside of us, but always part of a cultural fabric – and thus also an expression of our responsibility for the world we help shape.

Curated by Sara Tröster Klemm