Villa Romana in Florence is currently exhibiting Collier Schorr’s Blumen, the second installment of the artist’s Forest & Fields project.
For the last fifteen years Schorr (Season 2) has been documenting the life and landscapes of Schwäbisch-Gmünd, a small town in Southern Germany. Merging the identities of her subjects with her own idea of what it is to be “German,” Blumen is a play on the idea of floral arrangements. Gathering flowers from neighboring gardens and then transporting them to the higher mountaintops and slopes of the town, she then ties them together with strings which are held up by sticks. “By removing the flowers from their place of cultivation and positioning them on public land, Schorr suggests a migration or re-patriation.”
Blumen is on view through summer and also includes small black and white portraits of “the Germans” in a loose installation of pinned up images that play with scale, whereby people are dominated by the natural world. Close-ups of chairs, pears, and faucets dwarf the townspeople, “who exist in their ever changing world as almost nostalgic personages.”
