The Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía is honored to present, in its second year of collaboration with the FLORA Festival, the work 250 kg of lavender flowers by herman de vries (Alkmaar, Netherlands, 1931). herman de vries uses elements of nature as raw material for his creations, rejecting the notion of landscape intervention.

At the same time, his work is a critique of the effects of human activity on nature, as he believes there is no need to transform or add any artificial elements to it. For this reason, his pieces consist of "excerpts" from nature: carpets or samples of soil from different parts of the planet, floral tapestries, plants, found objects, photographs, earth rubbings on paper, dry leaves, framed branches, etc.

A trained horticulturist, de vries devoted several years of his life to the exhaustive contemplation of natural processes in his profession as a natural scientist. This experience had a decisive influence on his creative oeuvre, which in the 1960s began to focus on nature, motivated by his concern with the relationship between human beings and the world as well as by Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism. In his work, he has also fully embraced Gassendi's philosophical idea of Ambulo ergo sum ("I walk, therefore I am"), convinced that body and mind are interconnected in the act of walking, as opposed to Descartes' dictum Cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), according to which body and mind are two separate entities.

Armed with this philosophy, the 90-year-old artist still takes long daily walks through the Steigerwald Forest near his home in Eschenau, Germany, collecting plants, soil samples, shells and other things he encounters and including them in journals where he documents his rambles and reflects his working process. His production combines science, art, philosophy and nature.

herman de vries writes his name in lower-case letters to express his belief in equality and his opposition to any form of hierarchy.

de vries¿s work can be found in various international museum collections. He has participated in Zero group retrospectives at the Guggenheim, New York (2014), Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2015), and Stedelijk, Amsterdam (2015). His most recent solo exhibitions include basic values (Museum De Domijnen, Sittard / Framer Framed, Amsterdam, 2016; Jakarta Biennale, 2015), stein erde holz (Museum für Konkrete Kunst, Ingolstadt, 2016) and herman de vries 1960¿1995 (Museum Van Bommel van Dam, Venlo, 2015). In 2015 he represented the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale, and in 2018 the MUSAC hosted a major exhibition of his work.

With the support of: FLORA Festival Internacional de las Flores

· Album on Flickr