Tina Blau. Im Freien
January 31, 2026 until May 25, 2026 Museum Pfalzgalerie, Museumsplatz 1, Kaiserslautern (D)
Interface Culture University professor Laurent Mignonneau is exhibiting at the Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern. On display is the interactive installation Interactive Plant Growing, created through the collaboration of Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau.
She is one of the most important Austrian landscape painters. She masterfully captures the light as it breaks through layers of clouds or casts shadows under trees. And yet Tina Blau is virtually unknown. The mpk presents her comprehensively in an exhibition. As an impressionist, she painted en plein air, directly in front of the motif, and thus developed her pictorial language with which Tina Blau ventured into the modern age. Between 1872 and 1916, the painter created extraordinary works during her numerous study trips to Italy, France and the Netherlands, among other places. During her lifetime, Tina Blau took part in important exhibitions, found buyers for her avant-garde art like few other female painters and taught at newly founded art schools for girls and young women in Munich and Vienna. In this context, the exhibition aims to emphasize and profile Tina Blau's role as an assertive woman and her position as a great landscape painter in a male-dominated art world.
With the artists Simone Nieweg, photography, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, interactive installation.
Curator: Dr. Annette Reich
Interactive Plant Growing
(Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, 1992)
The rate of growth deserves to be studied as a necessary preliminary to the theoretical study of form, and organic form itself is found, mathematically speaking, to be a function of time. (....) We might call the form of an organism an event in space-time, and not merely a configuration in space." (D´Arcy Thompson,On Growth and Form, Cambridge University Press,1942.) "Interactive Plant Growing" is an installation, which deals with the principle of the growth of virtual plant organisms and their change and modification in real time in the 3-dimensional virtual space of a computer. These modifications of predefined "artificially living plant organisms" are mainly based on the principle of development and evolution in time. The artificial growing of program - based plants is an expression of the desire to discover the principle of life, which is always defined by the transformations and morphogenesis of certain organisms. Interactive Plant Growing connects the real time growing of virtual plants in the tridimensional space of the computer to real living plants, which can be touched or approached by human viewers differentiation.
"Interactive Plant Growing" (1992) © Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau