The Alphabet of New Plants

An album with the most beautiful flowers—yet something does not seem to be right, be it the scruffy contours of a stem made of plastic or the structure of the fabric used for the leaves. These are artificial flowers like those that are mass produced today and available in countless variations for decoration purposes. Making direct reference to Karl Blossfeldt’s The Alphabet of Plants (Urformen der Kunst) from 1928, Robert Voit (*1969 in Erlangen) assembles an archive of “new” flowers and portrays them against a neutral background. He playfully exposes man’s urge to imitate nature. Voit’s earlier series New Trees also addressed the imitation of nature, featuring large-format photographs of mobile telephony antennas that blend into the landscape camouflaged as trees, cacti, or palm trees. Robert Voit studied in Thomas Ruff’s master class at the Düsseldorf Art Academy.