Melanie Loureiro. The Interconnectedness of Creatures

The painter Melanie Loureiro combines living things that exert a strong attraction on the viewer in her oversized, detailed depictions of plants and insects. She thus lends a colorful and in some cases fantastical expression to vegetation silenced by monoculture and selective breeding, and brings us closer to the lives of caterpillars, butterflies, and spiders, as if we were observing them under a microscope, while also bringing them closer to us in size. In her choice of subject matter, Loureiro is influenced by the decline in insect populations and its consequences for the ecosystem. The black swallowtail butterfly and its caterpillar appear frequently in her paintings. This species nearly went extinct in the 1980s due to the use of pesticides. Moths, whose disappearance is less obvious due to their predominantly nocturnal existence, are another of the painter’s recurring subjects.

Loureiro is part of the tradition of scientific artists, including Maria Sibylla Merian and Cornelia Hesse-Honegger. Works such as Hans Werner Ingensiep’s History of the Plant Embryo, Hugh Raffles’s Insectopedia, and Jean-Henri Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques serve as sources of inspiration for the exhibition, which aims to better understand the web of life, in which we are intertwined just as much as animals and plants.

The artist grew up in Portugal and Germany and completed her studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Prof. Ellen Gallagher in 2022. She has long been interested in communication between plants, insects, and humans and the effects of medicinal and poisonous plants on the body.

Curator: Gertrud Peters