Curator: Dimitris Tzamouranis
Artists: Jenny Brosinski, John Issacs, Kerstin Grimm, David Nicholson, Johannes Kahrs, Marianna Ignataki, Jean – Yves Klein, Jonathan Meese, Andrea Stappert, Joachim Elzmann, Stefan Rinck, Dimitris Tzamouranis
Exhibition Concept
The Garden of Earthly Delights is a contemporary group exhibition featuring Berlin-based artists who engage an associative dialogue with Hieronymus Bosch’s iconic triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Rather than offering a direct iconographic translation, the exhibition proposes an atmospheric and conceptual re-negotiation of Bosch’s visual universe in the present—earthy, sensual, contradictory, and deeply human.
Bosch’s work functions here less as a historical reference and more as a conceptual framework: a space in which nature and the body, pleasure and decay, utopia and dystopia are inextricably intertwined. The participating artists from Berlin take up these tensions and translate them into contemporary artistic practices, ranging from painting and sculpture to installation, mixed media, and site-specific works.
The term earthy deliberately emphasizes materiality, groundedness, and corporeality. Earth appears both as a physical substance and as a metaphor—for origin, impermanence, ecological fragility, and sensual experience. Many of the works resist idealized representations of the body, instead presenting it as vulnerable, hybrid, desiring, and at times grotesque—echoing Bosch’s radical view of the human condition.
The exhibition venue, Galerie A49 in Kalamata, plays a central role. The geographical and cultural distance between Berlin and southern Greece opens up a resonant field between urban contemporary art and Mediterranean landscape, mythology, and history. Kalamata—shaped by agriculture, sea, and light—intensifies the exhibition’s engagement with nature, cyclical processes, and embodied perception. In this sense, the exhibition also unfolds as a dialogue between Northern and Southern Europe, between the contemporary Berlin art scene and the specific local context of its presentation.
The Garden of Earthly Delights invites visitors to experience the exhibition as a walkable garden: a space of seduction, disorientation, and reflection. As in Bosch’s work, there is no singular or fixed interpretation; instead, a multilayered constellation of images, materials, and atmospheres emerges, allowing pleasure and discomfort, beauty and abyss, to coexist.
29.05. – 20.08.2026
Art Space A49
Kalamata
Greece