David Hartt
Tuesday, 24 February 2026
Work from Naturphilosophie.
“Galerie Thomas Schulte presents Naturphilosophie, an exhibition of new works by David Hartt. For his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Hartt expands
on an ongoing body of work, continuing his engagement with themes related
to dominant systems of knowledge and representation, and corresponding
processes of marginalization and displacement. Reproduced as photogravures
or translated as tapestries, the works comprise images of plants photographed
at various sites in northern Europe —in the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany.
Bringing these peripheral, non-human agents into focus, the images reflect
on how our environment, and the life present in it, has been shaped by human
activity and ideals of the past—as well as their resonances today.
The sites visited and photographed by Hartt for the works on view—among
them, the historic university cities of Leiden, Uppsala and Göttingen—were
informed by the work of artists and early naturalists active there, primarily,
but not exclusively, during the 18th century. Through mostly close-cropped,
nondescript views, however, locations are kept from being fully identifiable in
the images. Their titles are the primary indicator, parenthetically noting the
city and date of the photograph, as well as the scientific names of the plant
species featured in it. Documents of a place and a specific moment in time, they
also refer to and enact a process of naming. Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus,
known as the “father of modern taxonomy” for having formalized the binomial
nomenclature system in 1753, is also associated with three of the cities in which
the photographs were taken. The presence of such figures puts the images in
dialogue with European artistic and intellectual traditions in and around this
period—a period also marked by European colonization and its effects, including
the movement of flora, fauna and human communities.” – Galerie Thomas Schulte