Giovanni Aloi in conversation with Daniel F. Hermann
What is a plant portrait? How does it differ from the picture of a plant?
About his painting Two Plants, Lucian Freud said: “They are lots of little portraits of leaves, lots and lots of them, starting with them rather robust in the middle—greeny-blue and cream—and getting more yellow and broken”.
Drawing from the research for his book Lucian Freud Herbarium (2019, Prestel) and inspired by the exhibition Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits which he guest curated, in this talk Giovanni Aloi will explore Freud’s ability to tease out the individual character of the plants he painted. The talk will be chaired by Daniel F. Hermann, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Projects at the National Gallery where The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Lucian Freud – New Perspectives is open now.
The exhibition will be open from 6.00pm – 6.30pm before the talk (entry included).
Speaker bios
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Giovanni Aloi
Giovanni Aloi
Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. He currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (www.antennae.org.uk). Aloi is the author of Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Vegetal Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019), Lucian Freud – Herbarium (2019), Posthumanism in Art and Science (2020) and Vegetal Entwinmentes in Philosophy and Art (edited with Michael Marder, 2022). He has contributed to BBC radio programs, worked at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, and currently is USA correspondent for Esse Magazine. Aloi has curated exhibitions in the US and Europe and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature.
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Daniel F. Hermann
Daniel F. Hermann
Daniel F. Herrmann is Curator of Modern & Contemporary Projects at the National Gallery, London. He leads on relating the national collection to contemporary art and culture through exhibitions, commissions, and residencies.
His recent exhibitions include The Credit Suisse Exhibiton: Lucian Freud – New Perspectives (2022); Bridget Riley: Messengers (2019) and Rachel Maclean: The Lion and The Unicorn (2018). Previous exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery include retrospectives of Eduardo Paolozzi (2017); Hannah Höch (2014); and Gillian Wearing (2012).
He is currently working on a nation-wide performance work by Turner-Prize winning artist, Jeremy Deller (2025) and on the catalogue raisonné of the prints of British artist, Eduardo Paolozzi.
Photo by Anna Arca, National Gallery
