Galerie Dumonteil Shanghai is very pleased to present Pollen, the solo exhibition of the gallery’s newly represented artist Ugo Schildge (b.1987), marking this emerging European artist’s debut in Asia. Featuring Schildge’s most recent works created during his two-month residency in Shanghai, Pollen encourages us to give a second look at the process of pollination — one crucial link in the entire ecosystem, and further examines human’s close rapport with nature through the artist’s allegoric narratives.

Recently, Schildge re-engages himself in focused themes and figurative representations, setting the shapes and lines in cogwheels free to dig into new possibilities in nature and humanity. In Pollen, the artist assumes a parallel world devoid of natural resources resulting in human’s struggle with food crop productions, a scenario that allows us to rediscover the importance of bees (and other pollinators) and pollination. Each work here is a captivating chapter of a grand symphony of life in which the bees, the flowers, human beings and everything that developed alongside humans are all an interconnected series of events.

The material is also a central element in Schildge’s work, among which honeycomb cardboard has been tactically integrated into the visual expression, rendering the work with a unique color palette and sense of layering. Working mainly with natural pigments, clay, wood and plaster, Schildge questions the traditional form of a work, blurring the border between painting and sculpture, canvas and media, control and freedom. 

Much more than a wake-up call for human development, Pollen puts the pollinators (and other overlooked crucial elements of our environment) into perspective, and highlights the true relationship between man and nature, but most of all, it invites the viewers into Schildge’s allegorical fantasy and completes it with their own imagination.