Bernard AMMERER, 2023 IPCC Report IPCC Report

What an idyllic setting! Trees, a lake, deer, mountains, a waterfall... looking at this scene, it is hard to imagine that Bernard Ammerer’s “IPCC Report” is an artistic discourse on contemporary climate-related issues. He draws countless letters, words, and sentences on large-format paper, arranging them to form a landscape. In the process, Ammerer combines two very different sources of inspiration. On the one hand, there is the landscape motif; it draws on “Sierra Nevada” by Albert Bierstadt, who likewise did not claim to represent a landscape realistically in his works, instead preferred a romanticised depiction. On the other hand, Ammerer references the 2022 of the IPCC Report, the annual UN overview on the global climate. The artist takes a few sentences from the report, recording them on the paper again and again until the entire pictorial surface is covered. His pictorial composition is ultimately created from the repetition of the words and sentences. Ammerer highlights the ambivalent relationship between idealised nature and the current climate crisis, addressing the question of how we want to look to the future —with pessimism or optimism, rationally or emotionally. Be that as it may, our personal engagement with our own carbon footprint plays a central role.