ARNE QUINZE

“I’m a Gardener”, presented alongside the installation “Ceramorphia” within the artistic trail in the forest, marks the first major Italian exhibition by Arne Quinze. Through eight large-scale oil paintings, the Belgian artist seeks to preserve, translate, and reintroduce the diversity of nature into human consciousness.

For Quinze, the figure of the gardener is not a metaphor, but a concrete, lived reality. For over thirty years, he has cultivated a garden surrounding his studio in Belgium, home to thousands of wildflowers and native species. It serves as a laboratory and a space for observation and ongoing learning, where the boundary between architecture and landscape has dissolved.
Quinze notes that, although humans depend entirely on nature, they have gradually placed themselves above it. His work reverses this view: in his paintings, humans no longer look down at plants and flowers, but instead see from below the vegetal world. From this perspective, everything appears transformed, and nature reveals itself as an architecture of extraordinary complexity. Stems act as structures, petals as spatial forms, and surfaces—marked by color tensions and layered movement—do not describe the landscape but express its vital energy, shaped by growth, collision, and change.

Quinze’s work highlights the need to relearn how to see, to kneel, and to listen. Being a gardener is not only about growing plants, but about fostering awareness, care, and responsibility toward the living systems that sustain us.

Arne Quinze, born on December 15, 1971, in Ghent, is a Belgian conceptual artist best known for his large-scale plant-like sculptures and installations, often created using recycled materials.

Quinze’s artistic path diverged from traditional academic training: he attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels but later dropped out and entered the art world through his early forays into graffiti art, which provided a foundation for his subsequent large-scale installations and exploration of public space.

Quinze has created numerous works around the world. Among the most significant are “Uchronia” (2006), a large temporary wooden installation created for the Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada; “Cityscape” (2007–2009), an imposing temporary wooden sculpture installed in the Louise district of Brussels; “La Sequenza” (2008), a large wooden installation on Leuvenseweg in Brussels, connecting the buildings of the Flemish Parliament with the Flemish House of Representatives, and “Faro Rosso” (2010) in Jing’an Sculpture Park in Shanghai, China.

For Quinze, the connection to nature is essential—vital in the truest sense of the word. As if on a mission, the Belgian artist seeks to break the monotony of contemporary cities by transforming streets and squares into open-air museums, all with a single goal: to bring people together, foster connections and a sense of community, and celebrate the value of diversity.