Rasmus Myrup situates nature as both the earliest and most enduring human experience of space in his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany ‘Vertreibzeit’. Redolent of free-standing dioramas, new sculptures of foraged natural materials coalesce with works on paper. His installations—formed with earth, stones, moss, twigs, leaves and branches from the mixed deciduous forests of Denmark and Göttingen’s woodlands—probe knowledge forms and the essence of being human.

In alluding to Western history museums’ preservation, categorisation and display practices separating viewer and object, Myrup serves to forefront the metamorphosis and transience of cultural practices and ephemera. Just as the exhibition’s title ‘Vertreibzeit’ plays metaphorically with perspective, the artist’s sculptures orchestrate actual physical perspective changes to promote alternate, amalgamated understandings of human and natural history. Fused with works on paper depicting gentle, speculative, intertwined pasts and futures, the artists defies our conditioned impulse to define and categorise. Myrup advocates a coexistence between nature and the human body that transfers and shares agency to and with natural substances. The exhibition at Kunstverein Göttingen encourages a reconstitution of life away from imposed dualisms, unfolding experiential dynamics of care, gender, sexuality, community and power that span flora, fauna and humans alike, and do not consider planetary and cultural history linear or separable.

Rasmus Myrup (*1991, Denmark) lives and works in Copenhagen, Denmark. Myrup graduated from the Funen Art Academy in Odense, Denmark; received a scholarship from the Danish Arts Foundation; and had residencies at, among others, Cité internationale des arts in Paris and Rupert in Vilnius.

Rasmus Myrup’s ‘Vetreibzeit’ is the first exhibition of incoming artistic directors Sarah Crowe and Alke Heykes’ 2023 programme ‘the body is a material mind’ at Kunstverein Göttingen.

Curated by Sarah Crowe and Alke Heykes.

We thank our funding partners: Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Stadt Göttingen, Landschaftsverband Südniedersachsen e.V., Sparkasse Göttingen and the Danish Arts Foundation.