The Irish artist Claire Morgan addresses our often ruthless treatment of nature in her works.
In pieces titled “over my dead body,” “building,” and “to an end,” she combines taxidermy animals with intricately shaped cuttings and plastic waste.
Through this staging, Morgan aims to create a beauty that simultaneously holds up a critical mirror to us as viewers.

Richard Erdman was born in 1952 in Princeton, New Jersey, USA.
After completing his studies, he traveled to Carrara in Italy, the world’s best source of stone and marble, and established a studio.
Today, Erdman creates monumental large sculptures in stone, bronze, or steel.

He gained recognition in 1985 as the creator of the world’s largest stone sculpture, carved from a single block of marble.
This monumental sculpture, named “Passage,” was specially commissioned for PepsiCo and is located in the Sculpture Garden at PepsiCo in New York.

The sculpture Spira, which you see here at the Enea Tree Museum, is Erdman’s current largest water-based sculpture.
It was specifically created for the Tree Museum from a 33-ton block of Italian Bardiglio marble and weighs approximately 2.5 tons.
Designed in the likeness of a Mobius strip, which has no beginning or end, the sculpture behaves as fluidly as the water on which it stands.
Giving the impression of floating on water, the sculpture creates a dramatic effect that reflects the power of nature.

Stella Hamberg, born in 1975, studied sculpture in Dresden.
Since completing her master’s degree in 2005, the artist has been living and working in Berlin.
The focus of her work is on the human and its unvarnished representation.
Sculptures that meet us at eye level in every respect when we look at them.
Hamberg’s sculptures, which emanate from a contemporary formal language, primarily depict humans but also creatures with elemental intensity.

With the title “Berserker” used here, she refers to a fighter who acts as if possessed, as known from medieval Scandinavian sources.
A fighter who no longer perceives wounds or pain.

Berserkers stand for both ruthless and reckless methods and the desire for a life without constraints.

In the context of the Tree Museum, the figure reminds us of that part of our human nature that is ruthless in dealing with our environment, resources, and nature itself.
The Berserker stands at the edge of some saved but slowly dying larch trees.
The larch trees that have already perished have been surrounded by roses – as a sign of eternal change and a reference to the natural cycle of nature.

Created from bronze, the Berserker also raises the question of whether and how we can reconcile nature and industrialization so that instead of continuous self-destruction, a stronger whole emerges from it.

Robert Ralston, born in 1938, completed his training as a restoration sculptor and painter.
Since 1962, he has worked in Spain, southern France, and now in Chur as a freelance sculptor and painter.

The sculpture Salvatg is carved from a boulder from the mountain of Lagalp in Switzerland, and stands among larch trees, whose home is also Lagalp.
Both bear the roughness of their original environment, breaking away from the polished surfaces of modern times.
Their impact reaches far and deep into our consciousness, creating an emotional world that requires courage to explore.

Lilian Bourgeat was born in 1970 in Saint-Claude, France; today he lives and works in Dijon.
His works are represented in numerous French public collections.
Bourgeat’s work, which began in the 1990s, is characterised by a constant search for the use of games and jokes.
The colourful and seductive universe of his “hyper-realistic”, oversized objects expresses Bourgeat’s extremely biting sense of humour.
His sculptures are conceived as real traps. They attract us with their playful aspect, luring and confusing us.
At the centre of Lilian Bourgeat’s work are the situations that can be imagined when using his oversized objects.

Bourgeat’s boots, or “Bottes” in French, stand larger than life in our tree museum as a reminder of the tides and the joking maxim that there is no bad weather for visiting nature, only bad clothing.

Sergio Tappa was born in Rome in 1950.
After completing his education, he explored various artistic disciplines including music, theater, and film.
Due to his continued interest in visual art, Tappa eventually trained as an illustrator, designer, and graphic artist.
In 1980, he moved to Zurich, where he worked in various large agencies and as a freelance illustrator.
At the same time, Sergio Tappa began painting until he fully committed to art in 1987.
Since then, he has been living as a freelance painter and sculptor in Zurich.

The title of the three meter sixty high sculpture “Animello” combines the spiritual and animalistic through a play on words between Anima and Animale.
The visual language of the work is clearly inspired by the motif of an elephant.
Tappa was greatly influenced by the mourning behavior of elephants, which closely resembles human behavior.
Thus, he created “Animello” as a symbol of the spiritual connection between humans and animals.

Tappa refers to the sculpture as “L’arte della memoria” – The Art of Memory”.
This art primarily refers to the famous monk Giordano Bruno, who developed a complex method of memory recall in the 16th century.
Bruno’s teachings also symbolize an opening to the infinite, a new perspective on the heavens.

Sylvie Fleury was born in 1961 in Geneva, where she still lives and works.
Fleury is known for her staging of glamour, fashion, and luxury items.
At first glance, her works may seem to confirm consumer society, but upon closer inspection, one also encounters a subtle commentary on the facade of beauty.
Fleury’s works with their staged surfaces possess an intrinsic value that goes far beyond a mere affirmation of brand symbols.

Fleury’s supernaturally large fiberglass mushrooms lure like a hallucinogenic temptation from a wonderland.
Cast from real mushrooms, enlarged to monumental proportions, and adorned with a shimmering surface, the smooth objects subvert all expectations and playfully reveal the mechanisms of the glamour world.
At the same time, they starkly contrast nature and the industrial present.
In doing so, they remind us of our own transience.
Simultaneously, they pose the provocative question of whether so much consumption of new goods sprouting up like mushrooms is actually necessary.

John Giorno was born in 1936 in New York and was active as an artist there from the late 1950s until his death in 2019.
His works encompass painting, installation, poetry, and performance art.

Giorno’s artistic practice is influenced by the Beatnik milieu and Andy Warhol’s “Factory” studio in Manhattan.

Through these influences, Giorno adopted the technique of Dadaist collage and began arranging text fragments from newspapers and magazines into short poems.
These often contained social criticism and wordplay.

John Giorno was a practicing Buddhist.
In his work “WE GAVE A PARTY FOR THE GODS AND THE GODS ALL CAME,” he explores spiritual and cultural energies and their influences on people in the surrounding environment.

The work references the cosmological connections of time and space; the stones engraved with messages act as a timeless medium with monumental aesthetics.
The work was first presented in an exhibition in the gardens of Versailles in 2017 and subsequently in Oerlikon as part of an exhibition.
In the Tree Museum, it welcomes you as esteemed guests; inviting you to contemplate the interrelationships between humans and nature upon entering the museum.

Jürgen Drescher was born in Karlsruhe in 1955 and studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf.
During this time, Drescher’s typical style of reinterpreting everyday objects manifested itself.
In later years, Drescher complemented his works with components critical of contemporary society.
They question social regulatory mechanisms and commercially oriented actions.

“The theme of animals has always accompanied me,” says Jürgen Drescher.
He was influenced by his grandmother Irmgard, who donated to the so-called “jungle doctor” Albert Schweitzer and introduced her grandson to Schweitzer’s “teaching of reverence for life.”

The Gorilla Family, a male, a female, and a young one, sit quietly at the edge of the entrance to the Tree Museum, calmly observing the guests.
Our view of this impressive species, so evolutionarily close to humans, allows for an identification with the Other.
The sense of belonging to the gorilla as a close relative creates a strong bond with the endangered species.

By the way, the male gorilla is not a stereotypical animal representation but a portrait of Kwashi, a Western lowland gorilla who last lived at the Cincinnati Zoo.
Kwashi’s head fur has a distinctly majestic, crown-like structure.

Placed as sculptures outdoors, the gorillas find their way back into nature while also reminding us of their threatened habitat.

The sculpture of the gorillas in aluminum casting, a material obtained with high energy intensity, thus becomes a monument to an endangered species and urges us as their relatives to engage in self-reflection.

Ugo Rondinone was born in 1964 in Brunnen, Schwyz and studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Today, Rondinone lives and works in Zurich and New York.

The sculptures from Ugo Rondinone’s series “nuns + monks” continue a narrative that the artist began over three decades ago.
After the AIDS-related death of his partner at the time, he found spiritual solace, comfort, and inspiration in nature.
From Rondinone’s perspective, entering into nature is entering a space where the sacred and the profane, the mystical and the worldly, resonate against each other.

Symbolizing this dialectic of the mystical and the worldly is the blue-violet “Nun” here at the Enea Tree Museum.
As an abstract representation of a nun, it is also a tribute to the friendship between Enzo Enea and the sisters of the Cistercian convent Maria-Wurmsbach, on whose land the Tree Museum was allowed to be built.

Standing with great presence at the entrance of the Tree Museum, the work provocatively demonstrates that perhaps nature itself can be its own religion and church.

Izumi Masatoshi was born in 1938 on the Japanese island of Shikoku.
He was a co-founder of the Stone Atelier in Kagawa, which aimed to establish traditional stone cutting techniques in modern architecture.

Together with the famous sculptor Isamu Noguchi, Masatoshi created the monumental granite sculpture Black Sun, which was completed in 1969 and delivered to the Seattle Art Museum.
After that, Masatoshi developed a studio complex where he, along with craftsmen, realized some of the most ambitious architecture, sculpture, and stone garden projects.
Zen and the aesthetics of Japanese gardens greatly inspire Izumi Masatoshi.
He describes his work with the words “Stone and moon play in the beautiful Seto Island Sea, moonlight carries the stone in the silent ocean, dew of the moon showers the Seto Sea.”

Zen teacher Edward Espe Brown expresses his feelings about our sculpture “Dew of Moon” as follows:
“Heavenly in your sight, I remain steadfast in your gaze, touched by the airy sunlight, welcoming wind and rain. We can never be apart”.

Craftsmanship, combined with material knowledge – this complementary duo of practice and theory was acquired by Jérémie Crettol in the Italian Carrara, the mecca of European stone sculpture.
The artist was born in 1975.
His sculptural works shape crystalline marble, used not only by Michelangelo, and volcanic Peperino: the tuff stone from which half of Rome was built.

Crettol creates his animals according to the design rule of the golden ratio and uses a compressed air compressor as a tool.
The result is a kind of contemporary ark, filled with robustly elegant stone and bronze animals.

The marble sculpture “Otto” – depicts a cephalopod with a stone-hard mollusk.
Proudly perched with around three tons of plump curves on its intertwined eight arms.
The arm ends lead to the only corners and edges of this content-looking cephalopod; they are pencil or colored pencil tips.
Has the octopus etched the engravings that adorn its surface with these tips? A cephalopod with cephalopod tattoos?

Time and nature have endowed the veined marble with a wonderful, vibrant patina, thus pointing to the mutability of natural matter.

On Yoan Capote’s first trip through Italy, he was inspired by the ancient masterpieces in museums and churches.
This led to the creation of the series titled “Requiem,” a requiem mass.

As a native Cuban, Capote has a close emotional connection to the sea.
He wanted to express both its sanctity and its vulnerability in Requiem.

To do so, he draws on religious artworks that use gold leaf as a central element, as gold has historically been associated with the sacred and spiritual.

In the work “Requiem,” Capote uses gold leaf to imbue water and sky with a spiritual light, visualizing hope.
Additionally, he uses blood as a color. Thus, his work is intended to serve as an alternative altarpiece, inviting empathy for the suffering of all beings in and on the sea.

The painter and sculptor Cristian Andersen lives in Zurich and Los Angeles; he is part of a young generation of internationally successful Swiss artists.

Andersen’s works are influenced by the experience of a digital society that suggests the immediate availability of all ideas, forms, and objects.
As a counterpoint to the flat aesthetics of screen worlds, Andersen operates a large studio where he experiments with traditional art materials such as ceramics or bronze.

In the Tree Museum, a bronze sculpture from 2011 can be seen, which aims to unsettle our perception.
“Bird” initially appears to depict an everyday situation; we see a little bird sitting on a random pile of objects, curiously looking into the park.
Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the “pile” is a precisely layered pyramid: composed of everyday objects and found items, it forms a pedestal for the classical bird sculpture, transforming the simple into the noble.
And the bird, wearing a cheeky hat, whistles a tune about this intelligent, artistic transformation that presents itself to the guests of the Tree Museum as a poetic sculpture in their path.

Nigel Hall was born in Bristol, UK in 1943. He lives and works in London and is a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.
This places Hall among the prominent representatives of British sculpture.
His works are held in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery in Berlin, the Australian National Gallery in Canberra, and the Kunsthaus Zürich.

Southern Shade V was inspired by the light of the South, by the treetops and shadows cast by the wonderful pine trees of the Côte d’Azur.

Throughout his artistic development, Hall has increasingly reduced his formal repertoire, resulting in objects of impressive clarity and purity.
Just like in landscapes, silence prevails in sculpture until the viewer moves.

The Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is one of the most important representatives of contemporary sculpture.
He lives in Barcelona and Paris; his work has been widely recognized with awards.

With monumental works, Plensa has shaped the comeback of figurative sculpture and made the human figure fashionable again in contemporary art.
“The focus of my work,” he explains, “is the human being.”
For the transformation of this classic theme into the digital present, the artist uses contemporary techniques and materials:
In his sculptures, he integrates not only the traditional materials of steel, marble, glass, and bronze but also light, resin, characters, and text fragments.

Specifically for the Tree Museum, Jaume Plensa has created a large bronze head of a girl: “Lou,” as the title of the work, is a typical Plensa sculpture.
It plays with our perception because it presents both a sculptural and three-dimensional as well as a graphic and two-dimensional view.
This confuses the gaze in a peculiar way, demands constant movement in observation, and thus opens up a special relationship with the surroundings.

Jürgen Drescher was born in Karlsruhe in 1955 and studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf.
During this time, Drescher’s typical style of reinterpreting everyday objects manifested itself.
In later years, Drescher complemented his works with components critical of contemporary society.
They question social regulatory mechanisms and commercially oriented actions.

“The theme of animals has always accompanied me,” says Jürgen Drescher.
He was influenced by his grandmother Irmgard, who donated to the so-called “jungle doctor” Albert Schweitzer and introduced her grandson to Schweitzer’s “teaching of reverence for life.”

Alpaca was created from the playful idea of creating the stomach acid-spitting animal as an anthropomorphic natural figure that defends itself against human intrusiveness.

James Licini has been one of the most significant Swiss iron sculptors since the 1970s.
Thanks to his training as a locksmith, material knowledge and technical perfection are trademarks of Licini’s work.

His early works include assemblages made from welded scrap iron parts that resemble tools from the locksmith’s workshop.
With their simple beauty and the contemporary use of materials, these sculptures are an expression of a modern worldview in which art and industry form a symbiosis.

Since 1996, Licini has been using the cube as a module.
T-beams and hollow profiles are formed into cubes, or doubled or tripled into upright blocks.

The works Meander I and II play with the visual representation of infinity.
They are placed under Ginkgo trees, whose leaves are believed to have life-extending properties.
Meander emphasizes both transience and infinity at the same time.

Born in Bern in 1974, Kerim Seiler now lives and works in Zurich and Berlin.
The artist’s early paintings depicted life-sized everyday objects such as park benches or ticket machines.
This was followed by further works such as inflatable molecular structures or a 250-meter-long neon light installation at Zurich’s main train station.

Seiler received high praise for his handling of space and structure with his installation “Relay”, which is now displayed before you at the Enea Tree Museum.
Relay was previously installed, for example, on the roof of the Hotel Crystal in St. Moritz, where it served as a studio for artists.
It led to a network of identical sculptures with architectural functionality.

A work of art in which humans are at the center, both on the studio stage and in the audience area.

Olaf Nicolai, born in 1962 in Halle/Saale, is internationally recognized as one of the outstanding German artists.
His work is in the tradition of conceptual art, which emphasizes the underlying idea of an artwork.
Using various media, Nicolai repeatedly questions established ways of perception.
Currently, Olaf Nicolai lives and works in Berlin.

Analogies between bee colonies and human society have long been drawn.
In the Middle Ages, for example, the strictly hierarchical structured bee colony was interpreted as an exemplary community; in modern times, the bee swarm is seen as a metaphor for artificial intelligence and networks.
By symbolically appropriating the bee, an attempt is made to find a correspondence for the existential relationship between humans and nature.