Existential See-Saw Ride

Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger
Uster (ZH) /Switzerland

Falling Garden

San Staë church on the Canale Grande
50th Biennial of Venice, 2003

Components: Plastic berries (India), cow pads (Jura), waste paper (Venice), baobab seeds (Australia), beech, elder and magnolia branches (Uster), thorns (Almeria), nylon blossoms (one-dollar-shop), pigs’ teeth (Indonesia), seaweed (Seoul), orange peel (Migros shop), fertilizer crystals (home grown), pigeons’ bones (San Staë), silk buds (Stockholm), cattail (Ettiswil), cats’ tails (China), celery roots (Montreal), virility rind (Caribbean), wild bore quills (zoo), banana leaves (Murten), rubber snakes (Cincinnati)...

Brainforest
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art

 Kanazawa (Japan), 2004

all photos via 

Gerda Steiner

 and Jörg Lenzlinger 

I have been intrigued with this work for several years. 

Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger have collaborated since 1997. 

I like Steve Peralta's description of  what they do. 

"Gerda Steiner's and Jörg Lenzlinger's work deals with an adaptation of nature through synthesis. The Swiss artists' currency is a Hegelian dialectic that gets an empirical flip sideways with the use of objects such as taxidermied animals and insects, glistening ponds of motor oil, dead trees and plants, and flowing streams of chemicals. 

Their work deals frankly with the unity of opposites such as life and death, good and evil, and hope and despair. It's an existential see-saw ride that lends beauty to almost anything." - Steve Peralta 

See more of his interview with the couple here.

See 

Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger's website here.

link to Amazon to find books about them here.