Taxonomy is a system for classifying and categorising organisms in the biological sciences. It is a way of creating order. At first glance, Nils Ekman’s images appear to be classic botanical photographs, but what are we actually seeing?
In the 1920s, the German photographer Karl Blossfeldt manufactured a camera that made it possible to reproduce plants in a new way. The details were magnified up to 45 times and the images became famous worldwide.
In the pictorial series Futurum Exaktum, artist Nils Ekman starts out from Blossfeldt’s iconic images, but we are not looking at representations. These are fictitious hybrids of plants, glass and meat that have been merged in a 3D-modelling programme. Of the series, Ekman says: “In an unbroken flow of manic creation the hard is united with the soft, the living with the dead, the organic with the inorganic.”
The Pictorial series Futurum Exaktum
Titles in the series: Verucia Ceratonae, Endadelphos chinensis, Phacalia carpiliodea, Kallima Trieda, Cutis Ampullacea, and Amnion ismaelia.
Artist biography Nils Ekman
Born in 1990, Nils Ekman holds an MFA from Malmö Art Academy.
