Julius Von Bismarck’s Good Weather Opening at Marlborough Contemporary

Julius von Bismarck
Good Weather
April 19 – May 20

Marlborough Contemporary is proud to present our second solo exhibition by Julius von Bismarck on April 19th (545 W 25th St). Based in Berlin, this globetrotting artist has visited four continents, including Antartica, in the past four months alone. Sourcing inspiration from recent excursions to Columbia, Venezuela and Mexico, his body of work continues to explore the point at which human beings and the relentless force of mother nature intersect.

The dozen sculptures, still photographs, and singular video installation in Good Weather investigate our Victorian inclination towards an ordered taxonomy against the cruel and chaotic reality of the wild. The exhibition as a whole acts as a highly distilled document of extreme power and violence.

Situating the jungle as a potent symbol of tension in Western thought (fear and romanticization of the rainforest ecosystem), von Bismarck stokes a visceral tension in his audience. Talking to Thunder depicts the artist’s attempts at taming a bolt of lightning. By firing an aluminum rocket (equipped with a grounding wire of braided Kevlar, copper, and silver) into a raging storm he is able to complete a circuit of tremendous power between the sky and the ground. The result, captured on video and still photographs, is an artist-made lightning bolt.

Designed to function as sculptures, the rockets are included here, lightning-struck relics, loaded with the history of the artist’s site-specific communion with nature.

Like a Colonial scientist, von Bismarck has collected plant species from jungle. Rather than pressing rare flowers in a notebook, the artist has used complex processes to press large plants and entire palm trees into flattened specimens. Heated to a precise 250 degrees in an enormous custom-built oven and a 50-ton hydraulic press, the plants are completely dehydrated, but never lose their verdant coloration. They are then backed with thin stainless steel to maintain their shape for presentation.