Save the Date: ARCHIVES OF THE LIVING
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MY NEXT EXHIBITION IN VIENNA
ARCHIVES OF THE LIVING
ENDANGERED PLANTS AND MATERIAL ECOLOGIES.
Duration: 17 September – 1 October 2026
Location: Galerie Mana, Stuckgasse 4, 1070 Vienna
OPENING: 17 September 2026, 19:00
Hours: Exhibition open daily from 16:00–19:00
Ruth Mateus-Berr — Painting, Collage, Installation
Olivia Haas — Jewellery
I am very pleased to present Archives of the Living at Galerie Mana in Vienna, together with artist Olivia Haas. The exhibition brings together painting, collage, installation, and jewellery, creating a dialogue around living forms, memory, transformation, and the ways in which we try to preserve what is fragile.
The exhibition continues my ongoing exploration of plants as more than botanical subjects. Within my broader Floral Archive, I look at rare and endangered plants as carriers of memory, cultural knowledge, mythology, and stories. My work begins with botanical research, but from there develops into a more intuitive and personal visual language in which plants, people, objects, and symbolic references can exist alongside one another.
Plants as Living Archives
The title Archives of the Living reflects a question that has become increasingly important in my practice:
what does it mean to preserve something that is alive?
We often think of an archive as something fixed—a collection of documents, specimens, photographs, or objects that records what has existed. Plants challenge this idea. They grow, adapt, reproduce, respond to their surroundings, and continually transform. Their memory is not contained in a single place, but exists through their relationship with soil, climate, landscape, other organisms, and time.
I am interested in this idea of the plant as a living archive. Through my paintings, I try to preserve a moment of its presence while also acknowledging that it is never truly static.
Each work becomes a kind of portrait: not simply an image of a plant, but a fragment of a larger story.
Between Research and Imagination
My process often begins with research into a particular species—its botanical characteristics, habitat, history, and cultural associations. From there, I allow the scientific information to meet mythology, literature, folklore, memory, and imagination.
I am particularly interested in the moment when a plant stops being simply a botanical specimen and begins to acquire a personality or symbolic presence.
Colour, gesture, layering, and fragmentation allow me to move away from conventional botanical representation. The plants in my paintings can appear almost animated, sometimes fragile and sometimes powerful. They become protagonists rather than objects of observation.
This is also where the personal enters the work. I don't want to simply document a species; I want to create a space in which the viewer can form their own relationship with it.
Memory Beyond the Human
One of the questions I continue to return to is whether memory should be understood as something exclusively human.
Plants offer another way of thinking about this. They respond to their environments, adapt to changing conditions, interact with other organisms, and carry information through generations. Their existence is deeply connected to the histories of the places in which they grow.
For me, this makes the plant both archive and archivist—a living record of its environment, while simultaneously shaping that environment.
Archives of the Living continues my interest in this space between human and non-human memory, and in the possibility that plants might help us rethink our own relationship with time, history, and preservation.
From Archive to Collection
There is a natural connection between the idea of an archive and the act of collecting.
Each of my works is a singular object, bringing together research, imagination, material process, and the presence of a particular plant. Although the paintings belong to a larger ongoing body of work, each one can also stand independently—as an individual fragment of this evolving archive.
I like the idea that a painting can leave the studio and continue its life somewhere else. When a work enters a collection, the archive expands. The collector becomes part of its story, giving the work a new context and allowing its meaning to continue developing.
For me, this is an important part of what an artwork can do: to preserve something without freezing it in time.
Private Showings
During the exhibition, I will also be offering private showings of selected works in Vienna.
These viewings are intended as a more personal opportunity to spend time with the paintings, collages, and other works outside the public exhibition setting, particularly for collectors and anyone interested in learning more about the individual works and the stories behind them.
The dates and details of the private showings will be announced separately.
I look forward to sharing these works in a more intimate setting and to speaking personally with those who would like to discover the collection.
Archives of the Living
For me, Archives of the Living is ultimately about things that are still alive, still changing, and still vulnerable.
Through painting, collage, and installation, I want to create a space in which we can slow down and look more carefully at the living world—to see plants not simply as decorative elements or scientific specimens, but as participants in histories and ecosystems of which we are also a part.
Each work is an attempt to hold onto a fragment of that encounter:
a species, a memory, a landscape, a story.
But the archive remains open.
The plants continue to grow, change, disappear, and return—and the paintings continue their lives beyond me, becoming part of new collections, new spaces, and new memories.
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