BIOGRAPHY

Nils Blau (*1994, Schwetzingen, Germany) is an artist living and working in Berlin. His practice encompasses sculpture, installation, and objects, with a particular focus on the relationship between natural forms and artificial structures.

Blau studied Visual Arts and Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), where he studied under Mark Lammert and Karsten Konrad. He completed his Master’s degree in 2020 and his Meisterschüler studies in 2021, both in the field of sculpture and installation. Since 2023, Blau has worked as a guest lecturer in Karsten Konrad’s sculpture class at the Berlin University of the Arts. From 2024 to 2025, he also taught life drawing at the university.

His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions in Germany and internationally, including Seed at Culterim Gallery, Berlin (2024), Rain Machine at Galerie im Turm, Berlin (2024–25), and The Graduate Show in Stockholm (2023). His work has also been shown at Kunsthalle Lehnin, Kunsthalle Trier, Galerie oqbo, Haus am Kleistpark, SETAREH Berlin, and Academy POSITIONS in Berlin.

Blau has received several awards and grants, including the Hanke-Förster Prize (2018), the Anna-Oppermann Prize (2017), a nomination for the President’s Fine Arts Award at the Berlin University of the Arts (2022), and the Neustart Kultur Stipend (2022).

His sculptural works often simulate and transform recognizable natural structures, creating a space between familiarity and alienation. Through ceramics and other materials, Blau examines how ideas of “nature” are constructed, perceived, and instrumentalized. His works invite an engagement with nature that is at once sensory and critical, questioning the boundaries between the organic and the artificial, the natural and the constructed.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Nils Blau’s artistic practice is shaped by the idea of a hybrid conception of nature and by a critical examination of the ways in which nature is perceived, categorized, and constructed through scientific and cultural frameworks. The hybrid between nature and construct appears throughout his work in diverse forms, becoming something to be visualized, encountered, and experienced. At its core, his work emerges from an impulse to imitate natural forms and phenomena, while simultaneously seeking ways of making them accessible and perceptible.

His individual works often function as critical representations of the asymmetrical relationship between humans and nature. Form and material are central to this investigation: they do not merely serve as means of representation, but act as starting points through which the idea of hybridity is given meaning. His sculptures, objects, and installations are not reproductions of natural forms. Rather, they are interpretations that are transformed through the manipulation of material, becoming something new in the process.

Within these works, associative elements emerge through the tension between recognition and recontextualization. Familiar forms invite identification, yet their transformation and displacement create moments of uncertainty and disruption. This tension allows the works to occupy an unstable space between the natural and the artificial.

Blau’s artificial-naturalistic objects both fetishize and question nature. They explore how natural forms are observed, classified, and desired from within the perspective of the Anthropocene. The sources of inspiration for his work are characterized by an essential ambiguity that operates on multiple levels. It can be found in the uncertain categorization of organisms such as fungi and corals, which resist conventional distinctions between plant and animal, as well as in the aesthetic ambiguity of natural surfaces and structures that can appear simultaneously organic and artificial.

The living forms that inform Blau’s practice continuously oscillate between seemingly opposing characteristics of form and function. It is this instability—between nature and construction, familiarity and strangeness, organic and artificial—that forms the basis of his artistic investigation.