Synthetic Spring by ArtEve and Eva-Maria Horstick
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: photo
Dimensions: 45 x 30 cm
Edition production year: 2012
Edition of 12
Price: $800.00 USD
Status: available
photography unretouched - made in holland in a field Title: “Synthetic Spring” Two figures stand suspended in a field that does not belong to them. Their bodies—perfect, polished, and unchanging—contrast with the wild insistence of blooming hyacinths stretching endlessly behind them. The flowers, vivid in shades of violet, breathe life into the scene, while the figures remain untouched by time, like artifacts misplaced in a living world. The composition plays with scale and illusion. At first glance, it suggests a pastoral serenity—two women wandering through a garden. Yet, the longer one looks, the more the illusion fractures. Their stillness becomes unnatural. Their beauty, repetitive. Their presence, almost intrusive. This work explores the tension between the organic and the artificial: nature as something that grows, decays, and transforms— versus the manufactured ideal that resists all change. The figures do not interact with the environment; they merely occupy it. They are observers without agency, symbols of a curated identity placed into an uncontrollable landscape. The field, dense and immersive, threatens to reclaim the scene, to blur the boundary between object and environment.
Why collect this work?
Synthetic Spring photographs two fashion dolls low among flowering plants, using viewpoint and cropping to make their scale briefly uncertain. Fixed bodies against proliferating stems turn a playful fiction into a pointed comparison between manufactured appearance and seasonal growth.
- Horstick states that her practice considers how femininity and identity are aestheticized and controlled. Here, coordinated clothes, long blonde hair and standardized bodies give that concern a specific visual form, without making the dolls substitutes for real women.
- One figure stands at each side of the frame, separated by a wedge of green leaves. Repeated violet flower spikes extend behind them, while frontal poses and hanging arms make the figures conspicuously inert.
- The documented photographic medium aligns miniature figures and plants within one image. Shallow focus, especially around the softer left figure and distant flowers, both supports the garden illusion and reveals its optical construction.
- Dated 2012, the work is a compact case study in how photography can naturalize an artificial ideal. Its tension rests not on disguise alone, but on the dolls’ inability to grow, wilt or alter within the field.
About the Artist
ArtEve and Eva-Maria Horstick
ArtEve and Eva-Maria Horstick is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: photography, collage, Sculpture . Based in Dortmund, DE.
Nationality: German
ArtEve_ Eva-Maria Horstick’s work explores the relationship between dreams ´, reality and energy
