Exhibition: Essence of creation

Isabelle Kaufmann¹

EXHIBIT REVIEWED-Genesis — The Art of Creation

Both biotechnologists and artists create. Genesis — the art of creation, showing at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, suggests their methods and aesthetics share unexpected kinships.

The Zentrum Paul Klee houses the largest collection of works by the early twentieth-century painter who spent much of his life in Bern. Working at the interface of figurative and abstract art, Klee studied the forms of plants, shells and stones, and drew from them new and imaginative shapes.

PRIVATBESITZ SCHWEIZ, DEPOSITUM IM ZENTRUM PAUL KLEE, BERN

Genesis — the process of creation — was a key theme. According to Klee, the painter starts with the basic elements of point, line, tone and colour (pictured, physiognomische Genesis, 1929). He experiments with them, recombines them, and so brings something new into existence. Replace brush and canvas with pipette and test tube, and this the exhibition posits could be a genetic engineer rearranging DNA and creating new forms of life.

Klee's geometric compositions and chimeric beasts are juxtaposed with paintings by fellow modernists Piet Mondrian and anatomical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. Exhibits by contemporary artists borrow the techniques of biotechnology. A transgenic video installation by Eduardo Kac projects a plate of bacteria expressing blue or yellow fluorescent proteins; as the cells grow, mutate and conjugate new colour variations emerge.

Also on display are paintings and prints inspired by microscopic images. Ross Bleckner's "In Replication" imagines the scene inside a dividing cell: a wild and colourful dance of molecules pairing, entwining and separating. David Fried's bubble shapes recall pictures of fertilized egg cells, captured in reproduction, and growing in harmonic patterns. These pieces demonstrate that scientific images enrich our knowledge and that their unusual beauty has a truth of its own.

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