Gallery Dittrich & Schlechtriem is proud to present the first solo show by Andreas Greiner in the gallery, titled Hybrid Matter. For Gallery Weekend Berlin, the Berlin-based artist has produced new works that reflect on how humans manipulate and redesign nature through genetic engineering, speculating on the future of mankind’s own genetic code. Characterizing Andreas Greiner’s work is his in-depth examination of the dissolving boarders between nature and technology. What is the meaning of nature in an age of digitalization and synthetic biology? The way in which we experience nature is defined by our prior knowledge and socialization, however what we experience in nature is changing rapidly. Human manipulation of evolutionary processes are posing ethically, socially, and ecologically critical questions which demand answers.

On entering the exhibition space one is welcomed by Replicating Seed a nickel-silver sculpture depicting cell division—a reproductive act and conceptual starting point of the exhibition. Sharing the same space, the work Edit Yourself KIT, a DIY Crisper Genome Engineering KIT which will allow one to manipulate their own genetics. The centrepiece of Greiner‘s exhibition is the sound installation The Molecular Ordering of Computational Plants, produced in collaboration with Tyler Friedman who authored the piece’s text and music. This science fiction audioplay reverberates within the main room of the gallery, composed of a luminicent aquarium and pulsating watertubes synchronised with the soundscape. Along the walls Greiner presents a new series of photographs showing miscroscopic images of algeas, titled Billions of Heart Beats Slowed Down into Synchronicity, as well as tumor cells, titled Hybrid Matter Studies and Panorama of a Landscape, realised with the scientist S. Diller.

“The works at the center of Andreas Greiner’s solo exhibition ‘Hybrid Matter’ constitute an epistemological conundrum. How sure are we of our fundamental convictions of life and death, right and wrong? Hanging in the dimmed exhibition space of Dittrich & Schlechtriem gallery are images of microscopic cellular clusters, magnified between a thousand and ten thousand times: clumps of human intestinal cancer tumor cells and spherical aggregates of Mycoplasma mycoides, the JCVI-syn3.0 strain of a synthetic bacteria created in the J. Craig Venter Institute. Greiner considers these pictures as portraits, like larger-than-life, celebratory depictions of individuals that have had an outsized impact on the public sphere. At work in these images, and troubled by them, are the moral and existential implications of portraiture. To represent an individual is to fix their likeness to a moment. From that point on, the individual carries out parallel lives: one propelled into continuous change, the other frozen; one guided by subjectivity, the other by the narrative interpretation of others.”

Andreas Greiner (b. Aachen, DE / 1979) currently lives and works in Berlin. Greiner studied medicine and later art at Universität der Bildenden Künste Dresden, then attended Universität der Künste Berlin in the class of Rebecca Horn and completed in 2013 with the class of Olafur Eliasson. Greiner studied with Eliasson at the Institut für Raumexperimente Berlin (2009). The artist’s works have been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions in national and international institutions. In 2016 he was awarded with the GASAG Art Prize of the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (Agency of the Exponent), and is thus included in the musuem‘s collection. This April 2018 the Kunstverein Heilbronn presents a solo exhibition with new a soundpiece and photographic work. Greiner‘s third monograph will be published later this year.