Creative Future Lab

Ingeborg Reichle, "Forever and Always: Strategies of Artistic and Biological Adaptation in the “Plasticene” Age." In: Pinar Yoldas: An Ecosystem of Excess. Exhibition catalogue, Ernst Schering Foundation, ed. by Heike Catherina Mertens. Agrobooks, Berlin, 2014, pp. 20-35.

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the seemingly endless expanse of the ocean and ist never-ending play of light and clouds have made it a source of inspiration and a place of yearning for the arts. The sea is a central theme in the work of many artists, from Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter. The latter painted a series of large-scale seascapes (Seestücke) at the end of the 1960s. In these suggestive works, the sea and the wide-open sky are painted in the style of the Romantics. One of Richter’s paintings from 1969 was even made into a German 145-cent stamp in Germany in 2013.

The exhibition An Ecosystem of Excess, which shows works by the Turkish artist Pinar Yoldas, who lives in the US, also revolves around the sea. However, the ocean is more than a mere source of inspiration for Pinar Yoldas’s art—she focuses on what is actually going on in the oceans. Overfishing, pollution, acidification, and rising temperatures due to climate change are all factors that have been putting stress on marine ecologies for decades and still pose a serious threat today.