Glenkeen Variations: Aftergrowth

“Gardening is a commitment to the future, blind like any act of faith.” Derek Jarman.

Glenkeen Garden—“beautiful valley” in Irish—grew out of a similar commitment. For over twenty years, photographer and Crespo Foundation founder Ulrike Crespo (1950 – 2019) worked a stretch of waterlogged farmland overlooking Roaringwater Bay on Ireland's southwest coast into a vast landscaped garden; half cultivated, half kept wild. Her wish was for it to remain, after her passing, a place of contemplation, creative experimentation, and communing. Since 2021, Glenkeen Garden Residencies has brought together artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers who, immerse themselves in the garden and, in a way, continue its caretaking.

With Aftergrowth, the Crespo Foundation presents the second exhibition in its Frankfurt Open Space to emerge from the Glenkeen Garden Residencies. Under the theme ArtNature/NatureArt, the programme explores how art and nature—or humankind and nature—mutually re-configure each other in the era of the Anthropocene, and what fresh perspectives might be drawn from Europe's often-overlooked rural contours. Working in groups and collectives, all the artists presented in the exhibition spent up to three months in the garden, in autumn or in spring, between 2024 and 2025. Over time, the garden ceases to resemble a fixed, picture-perfect image and reveals itself as a field of relationships in constant motion: tides swallowing the shoreline and then releasing it, branches bending and hardening in the Atlantic wind, fruit ripening and rotting where it falls.

The works assembled in the exhibition grew out of this kind of time. Scent, mosses, and fixed cycles. Immersion, mimicry, and radioactive fear. Holiday homes, botháin dóibe (mud huts), and houses made of wind. Echoing and remixing the frequencies of the region through music and dance, video and computer-generated imagery, drawings and paintings, they form a constellation of Glenkeen variations.

With Susanne Bürner, Annette Kelm, Alexandra Leykauf and Ines Kaag; Mareike Dobewall and Anthea Bush; Elise Eeraerts and Roberto Aparicio Ronda; Hana Lee Erdman and Louise Dahl; Forerunner; David Habets and Eva Gabriela Posas Rasgado; Marta Popivoda and Ana Vujanović; Eva Richardson McCrea and Matt Welch; and Sonya Sch önberger.

Curated by Ben Livne Weitzman.

Visit and accessibility

Opening hours Monday, Thursday, Friday 2–8pm; Saturday, Sunday, 11am–6pm. Closed 13–16 November, 20 November, 28 November, and 21 December to 3 January; 26 November open until 6 pm only.

Guided tours every Monday and Saturday, also in English and with DGS (German Sign Language) interpretation. Further accessible tours on request. For information on the accompanying program—such as guided tours, performances, workshops, and the concert—please visit the Crespo Foundation's website.

A bilingual catalogue is being published with DISTANZ.

About Glenkeen Garden
Glenkeen Garden is a large estate spanning 10 hectares located in Roaringwater Bay in West Cork, Ireland south coast. The garden was created by Ulrike Crespo, the founder of s the Crespo Foundation, and her partner Michael Satke over a period of 20 years. The garden is an inspiration for creativity and was also a significant source of influence for Ulrike Crespo photographic experiments and series. It features sculptures by several s artists, such as Peter Kogler, Gunter Damisch, David Nash, and Laura Ford, amongst others. Piet Oudolf, who designed New York High Line, designed the central grass s meadow.

About the Crespo Foundation
Founded by psychologist, photographer, and philanthropist Ulrike Crespo (1950-2019), the foundation is based in the founder’s city of Frankfurt with an artists’ residency in her adopted home of Glenkeen Garden, Ireland. The Crespo Foundation has a twin focus on the social and cultural sectors.

All exhibitions and public events organised by the Crespo Foundation are free of charge.