M HKA Ensembles

From a very early age, Joseph Beuys was fascinated by nature, obsessively busy cataloguing the fauna and flora in his living environment. At the same time, he delved deep into mythology and folklore, and so we might understand that Beuys’ method for investigating nature as combining rational thinking with cultural and mystical projection. He associated nature with complex psychological processes and the desire for a higher consciousness, and thus wanted to fuse the natural and the cultural world. As well as the recurring motif of animals such as hares and bees in his work, Beuys also depicted the landscape such as mountainous regions as a way to represent borderlessness and freedom. The protection and respect for nature was also central to his work for the Die Grünen (the Greens) in Germany.

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