Biomorphic worlds: Where art and science merge
Ink drawing: Detail tapir skull, ink and shellac, 2022, photo: Henning Bock © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2024
Exciting and fluid at the same time, close to nature and abstract: Bielefeld artist Henning Bock interprets specimens from the Museum Koenig Bonn’s mammal collection, combining art and science. From January 25 to March 3, 2024, his graphic and sculptural works can be seen in the special exhibition “Biomorphic Worlds” at Museum Koenig Bonn.
The exhibition shows a variety of sculptures and small sculptures as well as drawings, etchings, linocuts and woodcuts. They reflect the artistic approaches to seven selected objects. Over a period of more than four years, Henning Bock regularly visited the Museum Koenig Bonn, Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change (LIB), to make sketches and detailed drawings in front of the objects in the collection.
During his studies of fine arts in Bielefeld, Henning Bock already explored the forms, colors and structures of found objects from nature and worked on artistic transformations: “In the creative process, the two- and three-dimensional means of pictorial design influence and interpenetrate each other and open up new pictorial spaces between objective conditions and subjective interpretation and variation of organic structures.”
The scientific collections at Museum Koenig Bonn, comprising over five million objects, document the diversity and – often man-made – changes in nature. They reflect the change of species and biotic communities in time and space and provide researchers with the basis for understanding relationships in nature and thus supply data for conservation measures. The collections form the reference database for the description of new species or provide evidence that a species has become extinct.
Further information about the artist: www.henning-bock.de
