May 9 – July 3, 2025
Opening Reception:
Friday, May 9, 2025
6 – 8 PM
CLAMP is pleased to present “My Life as a Flower,” an exhibition of unique Polaroids produced by Dietmar Busse nearly twenty-five years ago, at the turn of the 21st century in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Coated from head to toe in matte, chalky pigments, Busse transforms his own body into a living canvas. Onto his skin he carefully pressed petals, blossoms, stems, and leaves, crafting self portraits that feel both fantastical and haunting. These images, rich with texture and fragility, suggest a deep intimacy with nature and a performative merging of subject and medium.
Busse assembles parts from a wide range of botanical species—anemone blossoms paired with carnation leaves on a stalk of aloe—to create impossible new blooms that exist solely within his imagination. Once complete, these fleeting arrangements are photographed before they vanish, emphasizing the ephemerality at the heart of the work.
Through this singular series, Busse collapses the boundaries between painting, sculpture, photography, and performance. His process foregrounds impermanence and transformation while quietly invoking our shared dependency on the natural world—an uneasy tether made more precarious in an age increasingly defined by technological acceleration and impending climate catastrophe.
“My Life as a Flower” coincides with an exhibition at FIERMAN of Busse’s camera-less chemical paintings as well as newer digital floral self portraits running from May 8 – June 22, 2025.
Dietmar Busse (b. 1966) lives and works in New York. He was born in Stolzenau, Germany, and as a young man learned the world of photography in Madrid before relocating to New York in 1991. His recent solo museum exhibition titled “Dietmar Busse | Fairy Tales 1991-1999” at Amant, Brooklyn, NY, was reviewed in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Cultured, The Guardian, and Paper Magazine. His work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; CLAMP, New York; FIERMAN, New York; Halsey McKay Gallery, New York; the Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau, Germany; Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam; Invisible-Exports, New York; Museum Sinclair Haus, Bad Homburg; the Leslie Lohman Museum, New York, among other venues. His work has been publicized in The New Yorker, TIME, The London Independent, New York Times Magazine and Interview, among other publications.