Artificial Nature

Artificial Nature is the catalogue for a 1990 group exhibition that read the American and European fascination with genetics, plastic surgery, and processed food as a single project: the replacement of nature with its manufactured image.

Curated by Jeffrey Deitch and designed by the graphic artist Dan Friedman, the show ran at the DESTE Foundation's space at the House of Cyprus in Athens from June to September 1990 and brought together seventeen American and European artists, among them Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, Martin Kippenberger, Robert Smithson, Andy Warhol, and Meg Webster. The 152-page catalogue, printed in English and Greek, pairs installation views and artist plates with Deitch's essay on how consumer culture had already substituted its own version of the natural world.

Friedman, known for his design work with Warhol and for the retail interiors he built at Fiorucci, gave the catalogue the flat, saturated look of advertising rather than an art book. That choice carries the exhibition's argument onto the cover itself. Artificial Nature remains a key document of Deitch's early curatorial voice, several years before he opened his own gallery in New York.