Stefan Bertalan Untitled (elder), 1979

Stefan Bertalan’s botanical representations engage with the temporality, cyclicality, and contextuality of the living plants being depicted. Not only does he hybridize the vegetal form with the anthropomorphic, but he also synthesizes botanical science and visual art. The elderflower represented in this work maintains recognizable biological characteristics, but the irregular repetitive geometrical forms and the chromatic of the cross hatching indicate a new approach to scientific research, an idiosyncratic rigor of observation. He called them “environmental practices,” and while acknowledging other similar previous approaches, Bertalan explained that it was these practices that “pulled him out into the sun and out of the two-dimensional space of the painting into the real space.”