Gerhard Kubassa has been painting the anthropomorphic trees or dendromorphic people he calls “Growing Bodies” since 2002. Just like the myth of Apollo and Daphne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Kubassa takes a female body as his point of departure and changes it into a tree. What remains is not just beauty (“remanet nitor”) but a female body whose contours are portrayed by branches and twigs reaching up to the sky. He starts by filling out this contour picturesquely in an attempt to make the obvious completely unambiguous. Later, however, he gradually adopts a freer and more abstract approach that transcends the boundaries of shape by having the trees grow up to a glowing sky and leaving the viewer space to exercise his imagination.
The “Growing Bodies” he has created over the past four years are gathered together in this book. They reveal the opportunities that are opened up through this form-finding process. We find nudes in the most virtuous of poses, portraits, sportsmen, galloping horses and bullfights, to mention just some of the motifs. While the English participle “growing” points to an organic development process, the corresponding term in German (“wachsend(e)”) lacks the primary sense of belonging to a botanical process, so the intended metaphor only becomes apparent when the viewer first comes across the picture – even though the connotation of a germinating und sprouting body resonates perhaps right from the outset. The motif of a person configured as a tree or bush, on the other hand, is firmly anchored in a long tradition of cultural history.
After all, precursors of this form date back to Ancient Egypt. They can be found in the depictions of Isis the tree goddess (e.g. in the tomb of Thutmose III in the Valley of the Kings; 1479-1426 B.C.). Ever since ancient times, numerous portrayals of the myth of Apollo and Daphne in which people metamorphose into trees have also formed part of this iconographic genealogy (e.g. the mosaic in the House of Menander, 3rd century A.D., Archaeological Museum, Antakya). In the medieval art of book illumination the motif is altered and reinvented in the botanical depictions of the mandrake plant (e.g. Codex Dioscurides neapolitanus, ca. 700, or Hortus Sanitatis, 1491) which is said to have an anthropomorphic root. Finally, inanimate nature became animated in the Renaissance: landscapes came alive with depictions of rock physiognomies and zoomorphic tree stumps.
Albrecht Dürer incorporated many references and analogies to men and creatures in the scenic backgrounds of his pictures. His intention was to convey additional complexity and compression to their iconographic depictions (e.g. “St. Jerome Penitent in the Wilderness”, ca. 1496, Albertina, Vienna). By permeating inanimate nature with soulful life, Dürer paved the way for Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Altdorfer, who intensified the spiritualisation of nature in their own works. Apart from Andrea Mantegna’s unusual depiction in his painting: “The Victory of Virtue over Vice” (1502, Louvre, Paris), in which the mother of virtue enters into a symbiotic union with an olive tree, this development led straight to the construction of anthropomorphic landscapes among the Mannerist painters. Joos de Momper, Matthäus Merian and Giuseppe Arcimboldo composed gigantic physiognomies from landscape elements and architectures, with trees and bushes serving as beards, noses or hair. Here, it is no longer the case that a single element of the landscape assumes human features. Instead, it is nature in its entirety which starts to resemble people.
It was artists such as Arcimboldo and pictures such as the brief descriptions of cerebral landscapes which Alfred H. Barr, the founding director of MOMA, presented as historical references in the first major overview of surrealism in 1936. This pioneering exhibition also included Salvador Dalì’s painting “tête paranoïaque” (1935, private collection), which amounted to a further development of Mannerism’s anthropomorphic landscapes in the style of his paranoiac-critical method. The depiction of a mud hut in Africa with a few trees and people sitting in front of it generates the image of a woman’s head in the style of Pablo Picasso. The “méthode paranoiaque-critique”, which Dalì first formulated in 1930, elevates “the systematisation of confusion” and can be regarded as a crucial influence on Kubassa’s work. Above all, pictures such as Dalì’s “The Three Sphinxes of Bikini” from 1947 (private collection) come closest to resembling Kubassa’s artistic approach. Here it is not so much a question of the anthropomorphic features he gives to trees or landscape elements in a naturalistic manner. Rather, and to a far greater extent than is the case with Dalì, the branches and twigs of the tree constitute the contours of a person. Like dark arteries, their branches extend into an ethereal will-o’-the-wisp to form ephemeral shapes. Ultimately, the contour enables manifest emptiness to take on a fragile form. At first glance, the title: “Growing Bodies” appears oddly inappropriate given the lack of volume and fleeting forms on display. For if these bodies – i.e. the trees manifesting such forms – are to grow, their appearance would be disfigured beyond recognition. And yet the potential for associations which is activated by this combination of words adds a further level of meaning to the visual confusion, a meaning apparently caught between fragile organisms and growing emptiness.
A fragile network of arteries keeps these ethereal bodies together, and envelops and embeds them in unreal scenery. It is always winter in Kubassa’s pictures. Not one single twig bears needles or leaves, not even in a shrivelled or withered form. The naked trees stretch out their branches towards heaven. The light is always indifferent, unnatural, like a polar light in a desert. Life does not appear in the trees and yet they form images of life and trees of life. Kubassa’s “growing bodies” are symbols of the fragile interrelationship between man and nature in an environment backlit by advancing devastation.
Roman Grabner, 2012
Link to growing bodies
GERHARD KUBASSA 