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."

RARE Plants explores the hidden stories of rare and endangered plant species native to Germany, bringing together botanical research, cultural memory, mythology, and contemporary painting.

For Ruth Mateus-Berr, these plants are more than botanical subjects. They become living archives of place and time, carrying traces of Germany’s landscapes, histories, traditions, and changing ecosystems. Each painting connects a particular species to a wider network of cultural and ecological associations, transforming scientific knowledge into a poetic visual narrative.

The plants are presented as active protagonists—symbols of resilience, vulnerability, adaptation, and survival. Their rarity gives each species a particular significance, while also drawing attention to the landscapes and ecosystems in which they exist. Through colour, symbolism, and carefully researched references, the artist creates portraits that are at once botanical, cultural, and deeply personal.

The works invite us to reconsider the plants that belong to a specific place and what their disappearance might mean. To lose a species is not only to lose biodiversity, but also a fragment of natural and cultural heritage—a story rooted in the landscape itself.

Each painting therefore becomes a singular portrait of a German plant species and a fragment of a living archive. For collectors, the works offer a distinctive way of engaging with Germany’s botanical heritage, combining contemporary painting with the preservation of stories and forms of life that are increasingly rare.