Of Herbs and Flowers

The word “herbarium” brings to mind concepts such as collection, classification, catalogue, research, and memory. It takes us into a formal, methodological dimension that historically shaped the production of herbaria, where knowledge of the real world combined with an undeniable aesthetic quality, but which has also inspired modern and contemporary artists to explore the different possibilities of the languages of art and of our relationship with nature and its elements.

The exhibition Of Herbs and Flowers. Artistic Herbaria. From Besler to Penone, De Pisis to Cage—showing at Miradolo Castle in San Secondo di Pinerolo (TO), Italy, from March 22nd to June 22nd, 2025—weaves connections between pages borrowed from historical herbaria and the visionary works of a selection of artists, whose reflections on matter and the elements of nature give us a mirror of their time and our own age. The historical herbaria of Carlo Allioni, Basilius Besler, Carlo Lupo, Pierre Edouard Rostan, Camillo Sbarbaro, and Ada and Alfonso Sella counterpoint the works of Vincenzo Agnetti, Björn Braun, Chiara Camoni, Adelaide Cioni, Betty Danon, Filippo De Pisis, Piero Gilardi, Giorgio Griffa, Wolfgang Laib, Ugo La Pietra, Christiane Löhr, Mario Merz, Helen Mirra, Richard Nonas, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Robin Rhode, Thomas Schütte, Alessandra Spranzi, and Michele Zaza. Outside the halls, the great historical park of Miradolo Castle, with its plant varieties, species and landscaping, engages with the exhibition—curated by the Cosso Foundation and Roberto Galimberti, with iconographic consultancy provided by Enrica Melossi—showing us another dimension of time, one similarly suspended between past and future.

The works featured in the exhibition explore themes such as the need for humans to classify and measure the world that surrounds us, not just to comprehend it but to unveil its mysteries or to exorcise our fears; or the patient, careful use of gestures whose apparent repetition reveal both their differences and ancestral nature; or the fragility of matter, whose ephemeral manifestation seems to challenge the passage of time.

Curated by Avant-dernière pensée, the sound installation of the exhibition is a reinterpretation of the piece In a Landscape. Composed by John Cage in 1948, a slow sequence of homorhythmic notes on the piano, each separated by the same interval, trace out a soundscape that is a tribute to Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement (“furniture music”). In the installation, two pianos perform the score simultaneously, showing, in the freedom of tempo envisaged by the piece, the impossibility of the two renditions coinciding. The speaker system designed for the exhibition halls constructs a space and mutes its perceptive boundaries, emphasizing the gap between the thought of the performance and its becoming sound. As though the musical idea sought in the action of playing is to be found “in the same way that you find wild mushrooms in the forest, by just looking.” Or listening.

Opening times: Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, 10am–6:30pm. Admissions close at 5:30pm.