Nils UDO Temple de la nature
Nils UDO 1937
Nils Udo was born in 1937 in Lauf, Germany. In 1955, he studied graphic arts and joined the city of Paris in 1960. Initially a painter, he put this activity on hold in 1972 after an initiation into forestry. Working with leaves, branches, the movement of water or the growth of plants, he produces with and in nature. Ephemeral sculptures or precarious installations, these works can be gigantic or discreet. Nils Udo does not speak of installations but of “situations”, as if the artist were standing back from the original poetry of nature. The lines are pure, and the osmosis remarkable; it is only afterwards that photography comes into play and leaves a trace of the work. Nourished by a sharp sense of colour, he returned to painting in 2000.
His site-specific installations are now famous throughout the world (Europe, Japan, Israel, India and Mexico). In France, he held an exhibition at the Centre International d’Art et du Paysage de l’Ile de Vassivière in 1999, and at the Château de Hauterives in 2012. A retrospective exhibition was devoted to him in 2011 at the Adresse Musée de la Poste in Paris. He is represented by the Pierre-Alain Challier Gallery in Paris and the Claire Gastaud Gallery in Clermont Ferrand.
Installation in the forest of Hauterives 2012
The artwork Temple of Nature was created on the occasion of the centenary of the Palace in 2012 and was immortalised in this photograph. At first glance, the eye is invited into a dense forest with loose, green foliage. Surrounded by plant diagonals guiding the eye, a mound of grass takes its place and five shrubs overhang the mound in the centre of the composition. The space creates a breakthrough of humid light, an opening towards a certain calm. Time seems to be suspended, and we are allowed to admire the perennial work, as well as the nature that surrounds it and with which the work becomes one.