In this joint exhibition, Berlin-based artists Anne Katrin Stork and Nicole Schuck create two distinctive spaces working in and around an empty, transplanted greenhouse installed in New General Catalog. Schuck’s large-scale drawings of animal-life and Stork’s onsite sculpture react to living conditions whereby life and landscape commune on issues of separation, exclusion, and growth.

superbien!, an exhibition space consisting of a greenhouse fixed in a courtyard of the Mitte gallery district of Berlin, will make an appearance inside New General Catalog, where it will be installed, curated, and occupied as a residency by Stork and Schuck. The intention of superbien! uses the greenhouse as a symbolic structure of environmental and socio-political responsibility. It is therefore apropos that the greenhouse is displaced to Greenpoint, a neighborhood that has been rezoned for gentrification while also battling its own history of environmental hardship and controversy, most of it stemming from the nation’s largest oil spill in history fifty years ago at Newton Creek, the strip of water dividing Greenpoint from Queens.

On the gallery walls, outside and removed from the transparent greenhouse, Nicole Schuck will install a series of graphite drawings motivated by an extensive hiking trip last year in Iceland. Investigating the island’s indigenous animals’ relationship to their landscape and ecosystem, the artist ponders how these creatures will respond and evolve to the quickly changing and threatened environment. Schuck’s drawings reveal a pessimistic view of fractioning and detachment, whereby piecemealed bodies, eyes, and feathers migrate from each other, not violently but rather like a puzzle. Plumage becomes camouflage and pattern maintains an overall connection, if only to this separation.

Inside the greenhouse, Anne Katrin Stork uses construction materials such as PVC and faux wood veneer to construct an interior ground and landscape from which seedling and growth might occur. But these materials are unnatural, and the sculptures they “blossom” or morph into are also of a strange order. The transparency of the greenhouse puts the new landscape in confrontation and dialogue with Schuck’s drawings, and together 3-D and 2-D work negotiate – in mutated states – their separation from one another while also attempting to cohabitate in a space that seemingly is protective, but perhaps only pretends to such.

Both Anne Katrin Stork and Nicole Schuck have exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions internationally. This is their first collaborative project in New York.