LUZIA SIMONS

Born in 1953 in Quixada, in the Brazilian Northeast, Luzia Simons completed her in Paris, first history, and then visual arts at the Sorbonne. In 1986, she moved to Germany. Today she lives and works in Berlin.

"The photographs of Luzia Simons give the impression of being three-dimensional, their depth of field is surprising; the matte black of the dematerialized background strongly accentuates the wondrous plasticity of the flowers. Even cut at the edge of the frame, the flowers seem to float in a diffuse space without direction, without limits.

Luzia Simons stages her flowers in a unique combination of material precision, beauty and vanity. She deconstructs conventional representations of these motifs, such as floral ornamentation, patterns or decoration, elevating them to the rank of art. The technique she uses to do this is just as exceptional. For her arrangements of tulips made as part of the Stockage series, she does not use a camera, but a special scanner that allows her to obtain incomparable spatial depth. What makes her scanograms so special is the effect produced by the pollen that falls on the glass plate of the scanner: instead of the classic vertical-horizontal division of a two-dimensional image, the works of Luzia Simons emphasize a tangible foreground that takes the viewer away from a floral dream without defined space and time. These works oscillate between extreme closeness and extreme distance, questioning the limits of our reality."

Excerpt from an essay by Matthias Harder, Mysterious, Dangerous Beauty