George Gessert is an American contemporary artist born with Milwaukee in 1944.

Graduate of the the University of California to Berkeley in 1966 and of the section Art schools of the University of Wisconsin in 1969, it initially worked like painter and screener. Starting from the end of the Years 1980, it concentrated on connections between Art and Génétique, exclusively directed towards vegetable hybridizations. It was focused initially on the iris of California and Oregon, then other decorative plants, such as the Syringa (lilac), the Streptocarpuse S and others.

As the artist explains it, one of the fundamental problems raised by these works are the statute of the nature considered as art, which goes against the Western tradition opposing art and nature, and proposing art like Mimésis or imitation of nature. It is with Darwin that the human culture itself could be regarded as a particular emanation of nature, dividing in this direction of the philosophical traditions such as the Bouddhisme, the Taoïsme or the beliefs of the Indiens of America.

Gessert is fully conscious of the implications ethical S related to the genetic engineering, although, using a vegetable matter, its work is much less prone to controversy than animal handling. It draws the attention to the fact that it is only very recently that structures muséales started to expose the alive one, which poses inter alia problems of technical infrastructures.

Its projects and its writings received many prices, of which the Prix Leonardo of excellence. It published in the reviews Leonardo, Art Papers, Design exits, Whitewalls, Massachussets Review, Hortus, Circa inter alia.

It is one of the pioneers of the Bio-art, of which it is one of the major figures.

Exposures

• New Langton Arts (San Francisco)

• Vasarely Museum (Budapest)
• San Francisco Exploratorium
• Smithsonian Institution
• Exit Art (New York)
• Single Place (Nantes)

External bonds

• Article in geneart

• Article in Circa
• Article in Leonardo
• Article
• Article in Circa
• Article in Exploratorium