Bright red, radiant orange, luminous pink, in between a rich green and a strong blue. Colourful large and small flowers, blossoms and umbels welcome the audience. But it is only gradually that one discovers what it actually is: screw caps and bottle necks, yoghurt pots and chip bags, straws and plastic cutlery, packaging material and plastic bags can be made out, but also remnants of daily newspapers, advertising brochures and leaflets. This far too beautiful nature is artificial. Marte Kiessling has created it out of rubbish. 

For almost a decade, the Berlin-based artist has been dealing with man's contradictory relationship with nature. The focus is on the longing for untouched nature and the simultaneous destruction of the environment by capitalist consumerism, the adherence to the promise of growth and the throwaway mentality. 

The carelessly discarded rubbish produced daily by all of us, mixed together and piled up formlessly in its random arrangement, is carefully sorted by the artist. In what is no longer needed, what is left over, she recognises a barely perceived wealth of colour tones, a variety of shapes and structures never consciously seen. She cuts, bends, folds, glues and staples in ever new combinations to create fantastic plants. In their variety of colours and shapes, complexity and variance, but also in their use of repetition, Kiessling's plants rival the richness of nature. 

Yet the work is by no means limited to the seemingly magical transformation of the ugly into the beautiful. Rather, it so openly poses the question of how quickly our view of things changes. When is something perceived as beautiful, when as ugly? When as worthless, when as valuable? How naïve and broad-minded are we to believe that the attempted invisibilisation of rubbish through further use, reuse or upcycling is tantamount to its disappearance? Shockingly successfully, we allow ourselves to be fooled into believing that waste is neither reduced nor avoided in this way. It also raises the frightening question of which nature we ultimately find more beautiful, which one we have become more familiar with. 

The opening and closing blossoms of the videos Growth - Flowers, which are projected between the three-dimensional flowers, seem strangely beautiful and almost psychedelic. For this, Marte Kiessling digitally processed time-lapse photographs of blossoms and superimposed them on a background that only becomes recognisable as rubbish when viewed closely. In this way, these blossoms also oscillate between beauty and horror, between artificiality and naturalness, between finiteness and eternity. 

The plastic flowers and the digital blossoms grow along the walls of the gallery, seem to proliferate and threaten to uncontrollably take over the whole room. What would be romantic if they were natural flowers becomes a symbol here for the overflowing landfills and constantly growing islands of rubbish in the oceans worldwide. 

This struggle for space is also found in the drawings and prints of the Islands series. They expose the naivety of the idea that one can escape from the self-contained system by retreating to deserted islands. The steeply towering rocky islands offer hardly any space for the futuristic-looking architectures built on them, paradoxically built by people who nevertheless longed for a reconciliation with nature.