ART CITIES: Frankfurt-Miron Schmückle

The Romanian-German artist Miron Schmückle is among the singular protagonists of contemporary art. Growing up in Romania under Ceaușescu, already as a child Miron Schmückle dreamt himself away to other worlds, worlds that, on the far side of the Iron Curtain, seemed forever inaccessible. From an early age, he took a keen interest in art history on the one hand and the flora and fauna of faraway places on the other. Together they led to a uniquely coherent œuvre.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Städel Museum Archive

Miron Schmückle in his solo exhibition “Flesh For Fantasy” presents 28 works, including newly executed works never before on view to the public. Associated with the idea of the jungle or primeval forest from the outset, Schmückle’s visual cosmos oscillates between fine-painterly hyperrealism and undisguised escapism, between the precise observation of nature and an exuberant imagination. The virtually botanical approach of his depictions belies the fact that his complex creations originate not in nature but in fantasy. Based on his understanding and observations of nature with its widely differing colours, forms, and surface textures, they bear a relation to florilegia and exhibit similarities to Renaissance and Baroque plant and still-life painting of the kind once collected in cabinets of art and curiosities. With the series “Cosmic Attractors” (2023), carried out especially for the exhibition, the artist invites the visitors to partake of the spatial and temporal complexity of his floral figments of the imagination, which in his conception are three-dimensional. By arranging different large-scale views and visual manifestations of one and the same plant composition in space, he creates an installation in which viewers can literally witness the plants’ growth. Miron Schmückle begins to work on his labyrinthine plant compositions by making detailed studies of individual elements such as leaves, roots, blossoms, branches, and tendrils, which he then goes about assembling to create harmonious structures. The connections resemble winding paths that, crossing over and under one another, prompt the viewer to trace them across the entire surface, taking in individual details as well as the composition as a whole. Schmückle conceives of vegetal forms as three-dimensional objects with a front and a back. The heart of the exhibition is the plant composition of the four-part work series “Cosmic Attractors” (2023) situated on the central axis of the exhibition space and engaging in dialogue with its architectural elements. In the middle of the space, facing the entrance, is the key work in the series, “Cosmic Attractors I, recto”. On its back is “Cosmic Attractors I, verso”, the view of the composition from behind. By depicting various phases of growth, Schmückle adds a temporal dimension to the spatial one: “Cosmic Attractors II” on the mirror wall opposite of John Armleder’s “Mosaic Mirror Wall Piece” (1991–2012) displays a mirror image of the aerial entity in a more advanced stage of development. And when turning around, one discovers the fourth work between the two entrance doors: “Cosmic Attractors – Nachstudie”. The mirror image of “Cosmic Attractors I, recto”, it now depicts the vegetal figure at the beginning of its growth and is accordingly smaller than the other parts of the series. The title “Cosmic Attractors” is a borrowing from the ideas of the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who describes the blossom not as the plant’s sexual organ, but as the boudoir in which the act of insemination takes place. The creative force of the blossom in nature reveals itself in the metamorphoses it undergoes to lure the world’s attention with an unparalleled extravaganza of colour and form. The concept of the universe turns up in Schmückle’s works with its ever-renewing energy that culminates in a cosmic moment and intensifies all the more in the knowledge of the fantasy underlying the drawings. His plant compositions have no rank order in which a top, bottom, or centre might be detected. The diptych Se sustinet ipsa II (2013) is a telling manifestation of this freedom from hierarchy: no matter how the two works are placed in relation to one another, the branch arrangement keeps them connected. Miron Schmückle’s works are hybrids from the technical viewpoint as well: he employs ink and pencil, but the technique he developed over a period of many years ultimately derives from oil painting. He combines and layers mediums possessing different physical properties, for instance water-soluble watercolors and gouaches with pigments made water-resistant through blending with, for example, tempera binders. His practice also includes the use of coloured inks that form thin, lacquer-like layers as they dry. By all these many intricate means, the artist allows some hues to merge and others to overlap, thus bringing about more complex light refractions and lending the muted colors greater depth. His pastose application of watercolors—a method untypical for the medium—ensures the transparency of the color saturation despite the layering.

Photo: Miron Schmückle, Cosmic Attractors I, recto, 2023, Watercolor, Indian ink, genuine stone pigments, Polychromos crayons and pitt graphite on cotton cardboard 153 x 219 cm, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023, Courtesy the artist and Setareh Düsseldorf, Photo: Joachim Schulz

Info: Curator: Philipp Demandt, Städel Museum, Dürerstraße 2, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Duration: 1/12/2023-14/4/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, www.staedelmuseum.de/