In the exhibition 'The Limits to Growth', Luca Kohlmetz explores questions about growth and the understanding of nature and comments on the contradiction of the Anthropocene with his sculptural works and spatial installations.
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How do we deal with the promises of the future and the expectations of a society in the tense field of finite resources and an ever-growing population that still stubbornly relies on continuous, unchecked growth and old concepts of progress? As early as the 1970s, the Club of Rome presented existential projections of a future perspective in "The Limits to Growth", a study on the future of the global economy, which has now partially become reality. A world in which we knowingly ignore the thinking, knowledge, and practice that are capable of redirecting the present. A tower of charcoal is stacked at eye level. How far can the "record" be pushed up before it collapses? Or is it already falling when we pull on the wrong coal?   The term "key" is of great importance in biodiversity. If key species, important ecosystems, languages, or people disappear, this can trigger a whole chain reaction. A chain reaction whose extent is just as impossible to predict as it is to bring back the lost species, languages, glaciers, and islands. Lost forever, but "there is always a little loss".
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While CO2-storing biochar takes up space in a circle, the "fog catcher" shows another futuristic way of meeting the global challenge of climate change. Monocultures shape our agriculture and our current consumer behavior. On an Ikea shelf we find precisely industrially pressed corn plants, while in the corner the mass of organic corn seed spreads out. Take a bag of seeds with you and plant them in your garden, on your balcony, or in the tree ring on your street. In gold and black, flowing yet solid, the framed natural material beeswax testifies to the conflict between man and the environment. It is an attempt to capture the seemingly opposite.
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The works are made of processed steel and coal, natural materials, and growing plants themselves - they tell of monoculture and biodiversity in a growing, hungry world that is reaching its limits and threatening to destroy itself. Luca Kohlmetz studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and graduated in 2022 as a master's student of Franka Hörnschemeyer. His works revolve around the pressing questions of our time and address ecological and social grievances. Natural materials and clear forms characterize Kohlmetz'sworks.