Aesthetics of Nature
The "Old masters" and the "Natural history collections" of the Museum Wiesbaden have moved into their refurbished rooms and have been on a new exhibit since 8th May 2013.
The Museum Wiesbaden, a house of art and nature, now boasts over 7,000 square metres of exhibition space, around 4,200 square metres more than to date.
"Ästhetik der Natur" is the name of the new presentation which, with its thematic rooms "Shape", "Colour", "Movement" und "Time", builds a bridge between the two branches of the museum, art and nature. The exhibition presents almost 5,000 objects: the worldwide variety of animals and plants and up to 400 million-year-old fossils from Wiesbaden and the surrounding area. Of focal attention are the individual nature objects created by preparateurs, which meet top quality standards and give the combination of nature and art new impetus.
If, for example, display cases with hundreds of types of snails' shells are standing between a display case with delicate birds' nests and a display case with crustacean of all kinds, making comparisons can bring about a new way of noticing the variety of nature.
Whether jewel beetle or desert fox, hammerhead shark or swan, polar bear or peacock, coco de mer or devil's claw, every object is delightful to look at and promotes itself. The intention is that you are amazed here, but this should not be taken for granted. It is also the merit of the preparateurs.
An abundance of questions concerning colour are answered with a glance at the blaze of colours and the crypsis. For example, how the colour red comes into feathers, how the iridescent colours of a hummingbird come about and why the coat of a marmoset is so shiny. The colours of nature are not only a challenge for science. Creative humans have been looking for suitable ways of picturing colours in all shades for thousands of years. Mineral pigments, plant pigments and culture-historically significant synthetic colorants perfect the exhibition of the colours of nature and the nature of colour.
What lives, moves, be it in water, on land or in the air. In the Movement thematic room, the visitors can come very close to randomly positioned exhibits and experience the power and elegance of the animals when swimming, running and flying. A group of hammerhead sharks swims through the room on patrol. Springboks flee from a cheetah at high speed and seven swans fly over the heads of the visitors. Fascinating motion sequences become visible which due to their speed are otherwise indiscernible.
With this newly designed permanent exhibition on the aesthetics of nature, the Museum Wiesbaden has gone about continuing the overall concept of the house and providing visitors a ramble between art and nature.