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 original and untouched. Yet this separation has long since fallen short: nature is today 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* comes in.

The animal depictions by Dana Meyer, Nelly Schmücking, and Matthias Garff show the animal not as a mere motif, but as a counterpart. It becomes a mirror of our perception and our responsibility toward the living. The exhibition venue Bad Ischl amplifies this questioning. The scenically idyllic Salzkammergut is simultaneously a natural and cultural space, historically shaped by use, aestheticization, and appropriation – visible, for example, in the Kaiservilla with its hunting trophies. Nature here always appears as a designed and interpreted reality.

The three artistic positions reveal this construction in different ways: Meyer's steel sculptures combine hardness with vibrant tension, Schmücking's works condense anatomical precision into an aesthetic "equivalent" of the animal, and Garff creates fragile, haunting creatures from found objects – of an environment shaped by humans. 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 thus also an expression of our responsibility for the world we help shape.

Curated by Sara Tröster Klemm