NAME: RARE PLANTS, 2024-2025
LOCATION: Galerie Am Fluss, Bad Ischl, Austria
DATE: 25.04.2025 -05.05.2025

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part of the series

"Archives of the Living: Painting Endangered Plants and Material Ecologies."

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RARE Plants explores the hidden stories of rare and endangered plant species found in Austria, bringing together botanical research, cultural memory, landscape, and contemporary painting.

For Ruth Mateus-Berr, the Austrian landscape carries a particularly personal significance. Part of her family history lies in the region of Carinthia bordering Styria, where she continues to maintain a weekend home and where the surrounding mountains, forests, bodies of water, and flora remain an important and recurring source of inspiration. The plants depicted in these works are therefore connected not only to ecological research, but also to a landscape with which the artist has a longstanding personal relationship.

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Rather than presenting plants as botanical specimens, Mateus-Berr portrays them as living archives of place, memory, and belonging. Each species becomes a starting point for exploring the relationship between nature and human experience, connecting botanical characteristics with cultural references, stories, and personal associations.

The rare and threatened plants become symbols of resilience, vulnerability, adaptation, and continuity. Their presence reflects the particular character of Austria’s landscapes while also drawing attention to the fragile ecosystems that sustain them.

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Each painting is conceived as a singular portrait of an Austrian plant and a fragment of a personal and ecological archive. For collectors, the works offer an intimate connection to Austrian natural heritage, seen through the artist’s own relationship with the Carinthian/Styrian landscape and her continuing fascination with rare forms of plant life.

 

In this way, RARE Plants becomes both an exploration of biodiversity and a personal act of remembering—a way of preserving, through painting, the landscapes and living forms that continue to shape the artist’s visual world.