"I like a bigger garden" was the insightful and fascinating response by New York gallerist Betty Parsons to the famous male artists in her gallery demanding that she concentrate primarily on representing them and avoid promoting lesser-known artists. I like a bigger garden was also the title of an exhibition curated by Fanni Fetzer at the Kunstmuseum Luzern in 2021, in which the work of Lucerne artist Josephine Troller (1908–2004) confronted two younger positions, the Swiss artist Charlotte Herzig and the Belgian artist Ben Sledsens. Taking its title quite literally, the exhibition presented a selection of paintings populated by flowers, trees, and blossoms, but also looked at the garden as a figurative notion to be explored.
This book presents Herzig's work as featured in I like a bigger garden, her first institutional exhibition. "What are we looking at when we look at Charlotte Herzig's wall paintings of flowers?" asks Chus Martínez in the essay she contributes. Playing with surface, space, and abstract organic forms, Herzig treats the world of flowers as a universe to reference—a means of understanding how nonhuman systems connect and how we perceive them.
Born 1983 in Vevey, Switzerland, Charlotte Herzig lives and works in Brussels. For the artist, painting is a limitless explosion, an immensity to be explored, a dreamlike "elsewhere": her paintings seem to have the texture of our memories and dreams. They offer us an imaginary space behind the structured and logical domain of our daily images. Their interstice is close to the one we create when we let ourselves go to look at the clouds, to play with the sharpness of our perception by observing wallpaper, by believing that we can read in the banal and insignificant visible signs of another still enchanted place.
The frame of most of her works opens with a whimsical density in which volumes, curves, and cuts are organically mixed. The colorful planes overlap and sometimes invade the exhibition spaces in vast wall compositions. The tones are fluid, and the images appear attenuated, slightly cooled. The forms seem to immerge from behind the canvas as if Herzig had painted them from the back. The paintings are made of accumulations, games, and collages, giving the audience agency to create a personalized narrative.
