Stefan Bertalan Călugărul Gregor Mendel / The Monk Gregor Mendel, 1983

This portrait of Gregor Mendel as a plant-being evinces Bertalan’s lifelong interdisciplinary search for a roadmap connecting humans, nature, and the divine. A voracious learner, Bertalan was a student of the arts as well as psychoanalysis, biology, mathematics, cybernetics and systems theory.

His close observation of organic processes and systematic studies of repeating shapes (such as spirals, grids, and fractals) led to the artist’s belief in an interconnected cosmology of all things. Simultaneously an obsessively detailed researcher and a staunch believer in the sublime, throughout his life he had vivid visions that he called ‘apparitions.’ In these apparitions, documented in numerous portraits, the human body becomes intertwined with that of a plant in a transformation that anticipates contemporary critiques of the Anthropocene.