Andreas Greiner


Andreas Greiner is an artist based in Berlin. He works with a wide range of different media including sculpture, installation, photography, video and techniques such as electron microscopy, algorithmic image creation and 3D printing. Frequently he works with biological and natural growth processes to create art works. His approach addresses humanity’s relationship with its living and non-living environment and the nature–culture dichotomy.
Throughout his career Greiner has cooperated with experts such as microbiologists, art historians, computer programmers, architects and artists, e.g. Ivy Lee Fiebig, Alexandra Spiegel and the composers Tyler Friedman and Páll Ragnar Pálsson. He is part of two artist collectives: A/A and Das Numen.

Early life and education

Greiner was born in Aachen, Germany. In Florence and San Francisco he initially studied figurative drawing and sculpture to improve his understanding of the human figure and anatomy. Afterwards he studied medicine for three years in Budapest and Dresden. Returning to art at Berlin University of the Arts he enrolled first in multi-media art and later joined the Institute for Spatial Experiments.

Work

Greiner’s work is informed by the natural sciences, technology and the humanities. A central focus of his work is the human–nature relationship and the Anthropocene, as currently discussed in academia and in mainstream media.

Living art and bioluminescence

By incorporating living beings as subjects in his work, Greiner questions the idea of art as man-made. Microorganisms make the outcome of the artwork unpredictable and this loss of control opposes the traditionally executive role of the artist.
A characteristic of Greiner’s work is the cultivation of bioluminescent algae and other bioluminescent creatures. When the water in which the organisms live is disturbed they produce bright blue specks. In a darkened exhibition space this effect has been produced mechanically by Greiner using musical instruments or gyroscopes to disturb the water's surface. Soundwaves have also been used to initiate bioluminescence in works accompanied by abstract musical pieces..

Living sculpture

Greiner also highlights sculptural qualities of phenomena which are not usually associated with sculpture. Traditionally sculpture is a static medium formed from inanimate matter and Greiner seeks to expand this. In the past he has demonstrated the plastic and sculptural qualities of an explosion, of social interactions and of electron microscopies of unicellular organisms .
Greiner has also framed animals as living sculptures. For example in Der freie Grundriss he placed a pupated fly maggot named Ludwig inside the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Once it hatched it became a ‘flying sculpture’. Its status as an art work was confirmed by the artistic director of the Neue Nationalgalerie by signing a contract with Greiner. Another living sculpture conceptualised by Greiner was a hybrid broiler chicken from an industrial fattening plant northeast of Berlin, whom he named Heinrich''. Greiner brought him to a suburban petting zoo in October 2015 where he died a few months later. His status as a ‘living sculpture’ was also confirmed with a contract between the petting zoo and Greiner.

''Study (Portrait) of the Singularity of the Animal''

Study of the Singularity of the Animal is the title of a series of works exploring the genre of portraiture, altered nature and non-human life beyond human senses. Traditionally this genre has been used to express a human subject’s individuality, character and beauty.
By portraying and naming a set of algae Greiner highlights the individuality, character and specific aesthetics of these microorganisms. The portraits are made using a scanning electron microscope, making them appear three-dimensional and less abstract from everyday visual experience. Other works using the electron microscope portray mutated cells, such as cancer cells and synthetically created bacterial cells. These contrasting types of mutations provoke the question of what is natural and where humans intervene in growing processes.

''Monument for the 308''

Greiner’s work comments on contemporary issues but also seeks to explore possible futures in what he himself has called “archeology of the future”. This idea is recognisable throughout his work, but most prominently in his exhibition for the Museum Berlinische Galerie or the ‘Kunsthalle‘ Meat Factory in Prague, in which he constructed a monumental sculpture 3D printed from an X-ray scan of a dead-found broiler chicken in an industrial feeding plant. This species of hybrid chicken—a modern biofact—is artificially bred, sterile and one of the most consumed animals in the western world. The 8 meter tall statue was meant to resemble a dinosaur in a natural history museum. Just as dinosaurs are icons of prehistoric eras, Greiner conceives the broiler as an icon of the Anthropocene.
Two years after Greiner exhibited the work, in December 2018, the Royal Society Open Science journal published an article by a group of geologists, paleobiologists and archaeologists, which asserted that common broiler chicken could be a potential paleo-biological marker for the changes brought about in the Anthropocene:
Changing patterns of human resource use and food consumption have profoundly impacted the Earth's biosphere. Until now, no individual taxa have been suggested as distinct and characteristic new morphospecies representing this change. Here we show that the domestic broiler chicken is one such potential marker. Physical and numerical changes to chickens in the second half of the twentieth century, i.e. during the putative Anthropocene Epoch, have been the most dramatic, with large increases in individual bird growth rate and population sizes. Broiler chickens, now unable to survive without human intervention, have a combined mass exceeding that of all other birds on Earth; this novel morphotype symbolizes the unprecedented human reconfiguration of the Earth's biosphere.”

Collective exhibitions