Botanisches Museum / Gallery

April 3rd - June 22nd, 2003,
Open daily 10 - 18 hrs

The late summer twigs of the pomegranade (Punica granatum) and the fruits of the bitter orange (Poncirus trifoliata) at Bonn's Botanical Garden served as models for the Bonn artist Christel Rump in the same way as the darling buds of May in her own garden.

In botanical illustration art and nature combine. Disregarding a few precursors, it originated at the time of the European voyages of discovery to distant continents. In those days one began "to hunt for plants" on a large scale, in order to grow them in European gardens for their exotic beauty and variety. Painters and draughtmen accompanied the explorers on their ships, so they could show to the patrons back home what the plants and seeds they brought with them looked like and describe them. The resulting images relished realistic detail, and a new genre in art was established. It has many friends up to today, as it is witness to man's will to appropriate nature.

Christel Rump expresses an inner kinship to all this in painting her botanical watercolours. It is a kind of painting with a scientific background, but which wants to give duration to the short-lived beauty of the plants in the images. The exhibition doesn't only show watercolours, but also paintings in porcelain, in which the images of the colourful blossoms blend with the glossy glazing and produce a new effect.

Mail to Christel Rump...