Bean plant, germination
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- Bean plant, germination
- Bohnenpflanze, Keimung
- 1976
- 6 b&w vintage prints
- 24 × 17,7 cm
This series of photographs was taken in connection with the project “Kinogram of the Natural Process Seen through the Lens,” which was included in the exhibition “Study” in Timișoara in 1978, a concept-exhibition conceived by the artist Paul Gherasim in collaboration with his artist-colleague Ion Grigorescu and the art critic Corional Babeți. The individual photographs are elements of a larger photomontage documenting the development of a bean plant from germination and sprouting to growth. They provide an account of the Leonardoesque approach brought to bear in his research, where photography played an important role alongside drawing and scientific observation. This photomontage was accompanied in the exhibition by a series of drawn bean plant studies, slide projections, personal notations, and an installation presenting the plant’s growth process. To Bertalan, the enigmatic development of seeds was a metaphor of human existence, a model to follow in terms of seeds’ adaptability to various environments as well an embodiment of art’s universalist/utopian dimension. As the artist noted on one of the drawings included in the exhibition, the processes of the vegetal world had become a concept upon which he could base further instances of aesthetic problematization, of direct engagement and confrontation with a unique reality structured by laws, principles, and relationships that Bertalan re-iterated as formative for our reality. A.Se.