NILS-UDO: Towards Nature
NILS-UDO is a German artist from Bavaria who has been creating environmental art since the 1960s when he moved away from painting and the studio in 1972 and began to work with, and in, nature. He began as a painter on traditional surfaces, in Paris, but moved to his home country in Bavaria and started to plant creations, putting them in Nature’s hands to develop, and eventually disappear. As his work became more ephemeral, he introduced photography as part of his art to document and share it. In this interview with art and ecology author, John K. Grande, he discusses his ideas and work.

NILS-UDO (photo credit: John K Grande 2024)
NILS-UDO started out as a painter in 1960, and in 1972 stopped painting and started to work on building structures on the landscape in a scale that fits, montaging natural materials on site. In this way, links are established between horticulture and art, but with great sensitivity to the history of the landscape and land. NILS-UDO’s approach is tactile and creates a visual counterpoint between the various organic and inorganic elements. NILS-UDO’s plantings were a major breakthrough in the field of contemporary art. The trees, plants, and materials he has used in works such as To Gustav Mahler (1973), Birch Tree Planting (1975) and Spruce Tree Planting (1976) embroider on nature using living natural elements in situ. Hidden and visible structures play a role. With Romantic Landscape (1992) a permanent installation on the grounds of Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen, Germany, an entire natural landscape, is raised onto an artificial platform yet is used by children who frequent the grounds. In New Delhi, India, NILS-UDO presented garlands of marigold flowers, that flow in long lines like curtains to cover an ancient arch structure evoking a sense of the sacred. For The Blue Flower: Landscape for Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1993-1996) a crater-like earth mound near Munich has a closed gate that contains a pond, plantings of about 10,000 blue wildflowers in a newly generated ecosystem. In 1994 at the Chateau de Laas near Pau in France, he created a living spiral comprising various corn species to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the introduction of corn to Europe from the Americas. In the centre an octagonal tower was built with original non-hybrid species of Mayan corn growing on top. At the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, France he created Sleeping Beauty, a fairy tale-like piece that merges his interest in earth structures and planted elements.
Art has been considered to be distinct from nature, even if nature is the raw material or source for these expressions. This separation goes to the heart of our civilization’s dilemma over identification with nature. Nature is not just a concept or a generality, but is everywhere. It is a constant presence whether as climate, vegetation, topography, or specific life forms. The evidence of our relation to nature is everywhere, not in “the way things are assembled” but in the things themselves be they man-made or natural. Flat screens, concrete, automobiles, steel, and glass all derive from nature, yet we largely do not recognize nature as a presence in contemporary life. Our modern-day vision is a techtopic one. We codify and process our responses to images, yet deny the presence of the real world around us. Nils-Udo’s works are, in his own words, a “documentation of a dying world experience. To bear witness, at the last possible moment, to a now seemingly anachronistic perception of life, an attitude that can barely be understood, even by those willing to do so.1 Nature’s process of endless reproduction and recreation are usually not recognized by most of us as we go about our daily lives. NILS-UDO is a realist in some sense, breaking through this dream-state of contemporary culture into the nature context. With a poetic sense he makes make explicit the many ways we perceive, define and reflect on reality through nature. Recent projects include Basalte on Buron de Niercombe mountain in Cantal, France and Habitat for Ruinart in Reims, France (2024)
NILS-UDO: Art in Nature (Flammarion, 2002), NILS-UDO; sur l’eau (Actes Sud, 2015) and Les 4 Elements de NILS-UDO (Fondation Francois Schneider, 2015) are some publications on his art.

NILS–UDO
LA PIERRE
Archival pigment print
Limestone, Marble, Trees, Shrubs
Maison Ruinart, Reims, France 2024
Courtesy Galerie Pierre-Alain Challier, Paris, France
John K. Grande: NILS- Great to see you! With your extensive experience working with art in a natural context, I am intrigued by your comment that your art is merely a pretext for enabling us to understand nature in context.
NILS-UDO: I am not a sculptor. I don’t furnish natural settings with objects or artifacts. The subject is Nature exclusively, and the result, the work of art is Nature herself. My work aids Nature in her self-presentation. It is an excuse to open the eyes and the hearts – for the reality of Nature.
JKG: What is your favourite artwork you have made? One of my favourites was the homage to corn/maize you made in France.
N-U: his commission from France has as its subject the five hundredth anniversary of the first maize harvest in Europe. On an alter-like piece at the center of the installation grew “teosinte”, the original maize from Mexico. But I don’t have a “favorite work of art”. My work ENTRANCE for example from the year 1980 is emblematic and metaphorical: a portal situation, erected entirely from materials found in nature, such as ash stakes and beech twigs, which, pointing to itself, simultaneously leads specifically and metaphorically back to Nature.
JKG: In Cannes, sur l’Eau was effectively a frame, or visual construct made with natural materials to see the Mediterranean coast, and setting. Can you comment?
N-U: Correct. A window onto the Mediterranean Sea erected on Sainte Marguerite with materials found in nature on the island.

NILS–UDO
SAND DUNE, PAMPAS GRASS
Archival pigment print 124 x 170 cm
Namibia 2000
JKG: Often your installations worldwide awaken a sense of the ephemeral, and they embroider on a natural context with what I would call poetic utility, a way of working materials in nature to heighten our sense of and interaction with place.
N-U: Every work is a response and reaction to an encountered situation and takes as its theme a phenomenon in nature to be defined precisely. All elements not belonging directly to the subject are left out.
JKG: Like Christo and Jeanne Claude, your works are often temporary, never intended to last, almost events of perception…
N-U: My work is part of life. An intervention in Nature is subject to and focuses on the subject of temporality. I am ephemeral. You are ephemeral. Life.

NILS-UDO
THE NEST
Earth, Rocks, Birches, Grass
Archival pigment print 150 x 150 cm
Germany 1978
JKG: For Peter Gabriel you made a piece with a boy in a nest construction off the coast of Vancouver Island. It is intriguing almost fairy-tale like, an inspiration to project a story onto this artwork.
N-U: This work is yet another attempt at finding a metaphor for our connection to and dependence on, ultimately our one-ness, with Nature.
JKG: What role does photography play in your art, either your paintings or your installations…
N-U: An experience in Nature leads either to an outdoor installation in a natural setting or to a painting in my studio. The starting point for both outcomes is identical, one and the same. The photograph of an installation in Nature transfers the subject and intention of the work to the medium of photography: a photographic work of art is created. Limited, numbered, signed.

NILS-UDO
RADEAU D`AUTOMNE
Chestnut branches debarkes, Douglas fir trunks
Archival pigment print 150 x 150 cm
France 2012
JKG: Do you pre-select a site, or is it very much about being in a place, feeling it, and then deciding…
N-U: I set foot in a given landscape without any preconceived notion of a project concept. The work is always a reaction and response to the situation in Nature I encounter.
JKG: Is there anything you want to say about the evolution of your art over time, about the remarkable neglect of nature in our world, in the art world… Why?
N-U: I started out as a painter in 1960. I stopped painting in 1972, and I began leasing land from farmers around my village. I no longer wanted to paint trees. I wanted to plant them. It was like opening a door. Suddenly, from one day to the next, I had found my field of work. The living, inexhaustible reality of Nature. Life! Since then discovery after discovery, constant, without interruption, from installation to installation, from site to site, from landscape to landscape, from country to country. I could work several lifetimes! And then, decades later, I began painting again (while still continuing with my work in Nature). Painting suddenly opened up another, sensationally open area of work. Nature as a subject of painting. Over and done with? Far from it! It’s also inexhaustible! The state of Nature, it’s exploitation and destruction worldwide. For my part, I can only plant and paint against it.

NILS-UDO
CLAIRING
Earth, Volcanic stones, marble, bamboo, Ivy
Archival pigment print 200 x 150 cm
Château de Lascours, France 2022
JKG: As part of Ruinart’s new Art Garden, you made The Stone consists of the alcove and the egg shape within a stone structure. Both container and contained are part of the piece, something that recalls some of Henry Moore’s more formal sculptures from the past. It’s partial emergence and opening suggests potential birth, an opening in a remarkable context and also suggestive of a shelter for something fragile – the egg. This work exists in the context of Ruinart’s new building and their 8 km of caves underground. The Stone is a celebration of sorts.
N-U: My piece The Stone, again a metaphor for life, can be found this time not in a wild nature venue but in an urban context surrounded by houses. It is the Maison Ruinart in the heart of Reims in France.
To enrich the situation I placed The Stone in a small hill and surrounded by a great number of bushes and trees. The Stone – calcite, white marble, bushes and trees.

NILS-UDO
HABITAT II
Oak Trees, Pine Trees, Grapevines
Archival pigment print
Vignoble de Taissy, Maison Ruinart, France 2022
Courtesy Galerie Pierre-Alain Challier, Paris, France
JKG: Your remarkable Ruinart piece called Habitats created in their extensive vineyards in Reims, France, is an art that is part of the ecosystem, something you have excelled at in a way that challenges the human-centred conventions of today’s art world…
N-U: La Maison Ruinart decided to create a program to enrich the biodiversity of their vineyards. They opened passages between the vines and planted bushes. To achieve this Ruinart took out thousands of vines and planted in their place thousands of bushes. In this context I put up three structures I called Habitats. At the top of a hole in the oak with many homes of varied sizes for insects I built a kind of nest out of pine branches and as well with many vine branches. An invitation for the many birds and insects to come back and relocate in the vineyards.
JKG: The venue for another new work, Basalt, is the theatre of nature and it incorporates the context, the material (basalt) into a remarkable locale on Buron de Niercombe mountain, Cantal?
N-U: I arrived in this beautiful region of Cantal in France as always without any preconceived idea. And, as always, my work consists in reacting to and above all discovering the specialties and particularities of what is for me a new nature experience. Nature is the medium and I constantly have to react to my experience in arriving at a particular creation. At this time, I soon discovered this beautiful and somber stone – basalt. Right-away decided to work with it. This work I created in such a remarkable site exposes and uses an element so characteristic and emblematic of the Cantal area into the theme of the on-site sculpture – BASALT.

NILS-UDO
LA BELLE AU BOIS DORMANT
Rose Planting, “Paris” – Perfume by Yves Saint Laurent
Jardin des Plantes, Paris 1999
JKG: I have always loved your sense of place in the installation works, as when we worked at the Royal Botanical Gardens, the Van Dusen Gardens and the Laurentians to name a few of the venues in Canada… You have such a Romantic and poetic sensibility that shares nature. And when we were walking in the forests in Bavaria near your home, you mentioned how much you loved Hölderlin’s poetry…
N-U: Hölderlin is the greatest poet of the German language and his poem AN die NATUR (1795) is not just text and summit of poetry, but all an immense symphony that sings and celebrates in a way comparable to Gustav Mahler, the inexhaustible and mysterious wealth of Nature and of Life!
Footnote
- Nils-Udo cited in Art & Design Profile No. 36, Special Issue

NILS-UDO
SEQUOIA PIECE
Archival pigment print. 150 x 150 cm
Van Dusen Gardens, Vancouver BC, Canada 2012
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All images copyright and courtesy of NILS-UDO
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