Galleri Christoffer Egelund proudly presents Synthetic Eden, the 7th solo show at the gallery by Swiss-Austrian artist Thierry Feuz. Feuz’ colorful and dynamic universe of flowers, microbes, nature and movement fascinates the viewer with their innovation and vitality. The exhibition, which consists of entirely new paintings and sculptures, can be experienced at Bredgade 75 from August 29th until September 26th 2025.

An explosion of color and life meets the viewer in the works of Thierry Feuz. Beautiful flowers abound and a symphony of radiant color creates a feeling of joy, hope and happiness. The dynamism created by pouring the paint onto the canvas creates a feeling of organic movement and compositions that seem to shift and move under the viewer’s gaze. However, there is more to Thierry Feuz’ art than their visual splendor; a fusion of the wonders of art and science, Thierry Feuz’ paintings show just how fascinating and wondrous our world is.

Flower painting as a genre is well-established in art history. It first emerged as a genre appreciated in its own right during the 17th century. Occupied with technical detail and accurate rendering and representation of flower species, 17th flower painting was a symptom of an overall tendency of the classical era to map, categorize and sort the world into categories, creating an overall system marked by order and clarity. A prime example of this way of sorting the world is the nomenclature and taxonomical system of animal and plant species created by Swedish botanist Carl von Linné in his work Systema Natura – the very same system that we use today for the classification and Latin naming of living beings. Flower paintings might contain flowers from every continent, documenting the breadth of the world (or a colonial empire’s conquered territory); it might contain seashells and insects besides flowers, encompassing both sea, earth and sky. Flowers were painted meticulously, showing every detail of petals, stems and stamens so that species might be accurately recognized, aided by the then newly-created works on flower taxonomy – flower painting was almost a science. Common for them all was the desire to create paintings that were small worlds onto themselves, microcosms that represented and mapped the extent of a larger macrocosm, symbolically capturing it within the frame.

Thierry’s flower paintings discard this traditional love of the systematic in favor of boldness and vitality. His technique of laying the canvas flat on the ground and pouring the paint onto it creates bold, dynamic marks that have inherent movement and life – quite the contrast to the meticulously painted flowers of past centuries. This technique originated in the 1950s with Jackson Pollock’s action painting – the act of laying the canvas on the ground and splattering or pouring the paint onto it to create dynamic marks, letting organic accidents take the lead in the creative process. Using lacquer, Thierry Feuz achieves an entirely smooth surface, creating a sleek and streamlined look which differs drastically from the textured action paintings of the 1950s. By transforming the organic drips into flowers, Thierry Feuz lets the energy imparted by the random breathe new life into the genre of flower painting.

However, Thierry’s paintings retain the connection between art and science which was intrinsic to the flower paintings of the baroque era. Inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’ film The power of ten (1977) which visualizes the relative scale of the universe, from the smallest atoms and quarks to entire galaxies in a manner of minutes, Thierry Feuz’ paintings show the vivid world that unfolds on a microscopic scale – and in space. Utilizing the evocative power of his backgrounds, which vary from pure white – like the backlight of a microscope behind a bacteria sample, transforming the swirling flowers into microorganisms – to dark blues and purples like the endless expanse of space, his oeuvre contains all of nature, from the smallest to the grandest. Thus, Thierry’s works embody the mutually beneficial bond between art and science just like the classical flower paintings of the baroque era did.

Changing from flowers to microorganisms and black to flowers again, Thierry Feuz’ paintings play with our inability to see two things at once in the manner of classic visual illusions like the Rubin vase. At once paint and subject, bacteria and flowers, they embody the fusion of art and science, creating an artistic spectacle which is both theoretically profound and visually stunning.