Immortalizing the ephemeral: the botanical art of Duy Anh Nhan Duc

His desire: “to reconnect with a moment in our lives when we were still cultivating this special bond with nature”. In Duy Anh Nhan Duc's works, there is a fragile link to the passage of time, to the short life of a flower or plant, from the peak of its beauty to its decline, to the cycles we sometimes wish we could stop...

To console himself, the artist freezes plants forever. Flowers are encased in inflatable balloons, eggs are adorned with rose thorns, bouquets are encapsulated and immortalized in resin, maple seeds are painted gold, bark and lichen are transformed into frescoes or mandalas. Despite their fragility, their enduring appeal is surprising.

An alchemist of the natural, he recreates new graceful plant curiosities, immersive installations or paintings from these divine works that fascinate him...

“The creations I imagine bring to light plants that we all know, but sometimes no longer look at,” he says. In fact, his plant experiments are veritable curiosities. He installs thousands of suspended dandelion egrets. This is his “kryptonite”, which evokes for him “all the beauty of the world and at the same time its great fragility. A symbol of freedom and untamed nature, this plant blooms almost everywhere on the planet. In front of it, we are caught up by a simple childhood pleasure, that of blowing on it to make a wish and see its thousands of egrets fly away.”

With these works that defy time and gravity, the visual artist also immortalizes the excellence of nature's creations, reinventing the language of a flower. The artist's works have spread to the Musée Guimet, where he invented a “parloir des souhaits”, to the art center Le Cent-Quatre in Paris, to Chaumont sur Loire or during Homo Faber in Venice, the prestigious fair dedicated to contemporary crafts, as well as to Arles, the Domaine des Etangs in Massignac, in the heart of nature, and as far away as China.

He has taken part in prestigious collaborations with champagne brands Roederer as well as Guerlain, Hermès and Christian Dior, and signed a monumental 100m2 work for the La Courneuve-Six Routes station as part of the public commission for the Grand Paris Express, inaugurated for the 2024 Olympic Games, in tandem with architects Chartier-Dalix. The project is featured in the exhibition “Métro! Le Grand Paris en mouvement” exhibition at the Cité de l'Architecture in Paris until June 2, 2024.
From October 25, 2024 to January 5, 2025, the artist will present a carte blanche exhibition on trees at the Espace Richaud, the former royal hospital in Versailles: monumental wooden sculptures, bark prints, canvases made from leaf, fruit and seed pigments, forest earth frescoes...