Cor Dera

Untitled (Hummingbirds), 1993

In the 36-part series of artworks Untitled (Hummingbirds), Cor Dera presents small-format, square photographs of various different types of hummingbird taken from nature magazines and from specialist zoological publications. Neither the literal content not the technique is ‘new‘. The open, expendable structure of reproductions of nature and the constructive arrangement principle convey – for all their beauty – an abrupt image of nature’s lost self-assertion. Cor Dera’s photographic works spell out, with unsentimental austerity, the emergence of a unity of nature and culture, but they do it in such a way that the imagination is left completely free to invoke every single image that constitutes our understanding of nature. “My work is not about adding something, but it is more about doing as little as possible to these re-photographed nature photos […] I am working on an idea of wholeness – as nature represents a whole. (Dera)