Miron Schmückle: Flesh for Fantasy

Miron Schmückle is among the singular protagonists of contemporary art.
The Städel Museum is presenting a solo exhibition featuring 28 works by the Romanian-German artist, including newly executed works never before on view to the public.

Associated with the idea of the jungle or primeval forest from the outset, Schmückle’s visual cosmos oscillates between fine-painterly hyperrealism and undisguised escapism, between the precise observation of nature and an exuberant imagination. The virtually botanical approach of his depictions belies the fact that his complex creations originate not in nature but in fantasy.

With the series Cosmic Attractors (2023) carried out especially for the exhibition Flesh for Fantasy, the artist invites the visitors to partake of the spatial and temporal complexity of his floral figments of the imagination, which in his conception are three-dimensional. By arranging different large-scale views and visual manifestations of one and the same plant composition in space, he creates an installation in which viewers can literally witness the plants’ growth.

Philipp Demandt, the director of the Städel Museum and curator of the exhibition: “With plant and growth drawings both hyperrealistic and fantastical, the artist Miron Schmückle has carved out a place for himself in an art-historical tradition revolving around the precise observation and reproduction of nature. Works by Maria Sybilla Merian, Georg Flegel, and others, but also The Little Garden of Paradise from the Städel Museum collection, are outstanding examples of artistic imagery bearing an affinity to the delicate drawings of Miron Schmückle. His plant-animal hybrids amalgamate fragrance and poison, beauty and transience, anatomy and sexuality in an œuvre as timeless as it is anachronistic, and occupy a realm between truth and invention, life and death.”

Growing up in Romania under Ceaușescu, already as a child Miron Schmückle dreamt himself away to other worlds—worlds that, on the far side of the Iron Curtain, seemed forever inaccessible. From an early age, he took a keen interest in art history on the one hand and the flora and fauna of faraway places on the other. Together they led to a uniquely coherent œuvre. Based on his understanding and observations of nature with its widely differing colours, forms, and surface textures, his works bear a relation to florilegia and exhibit similarities to Renaissance and Baroque plant and still-life painting of the kind once collected in cabinets of art and curiosities.

Miron Schmückle (born in Sibiu/Hermannstadt in 1966) lives and works in Berlin. From 1991 to 1996 he studied at the Muthesius-Kunsthochschule (Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design) in Kiel and in 1994 at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste (University of Fine Arts) Hamburg. In 2016 he earned his doctorate at the Institut für Kunstwissenschaften of the Muthesius-Kunsthochschule. Miron Schmückle’s works have been on view in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Germany and abroad including the Kunsthalle München, the Kunstmuseum Bayreuth, the Brukenthal National Museum in Hermannstadt, the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, the Sprengel Museum Hannover, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Examples of his art are also found in several public and private art collections.

Director and Curator: Dr Philipp Demandt  
Press contact: Pamela Rohde (Head of Press and Online Communication):
presse@staedelmuseum.de / T (+49 69) 605098 170
Press material: here (texts and images for download)