Tita Giese

Germany's Most Extravagant Plant Expert

Tita Giese (b. Nördlingen, 1942; lives and works in Düsseldorf) realizes vegetal landscapes in public settings-urban squares, intersections, and gardens around architectural structures. She spent several semesters at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied with Joseph Beuys, but she does not want to be seen as an artist. Focusing on sites in urban and industrial environments, she helps nature reclaim a niche for itself, developing unique projects at the intersection between art, architecture, urban planning, and botany. She planted bamboo on the grounds of the Düsseldorf airport, palm trees on the square in front of Hamburg's Deichtorhallen, and creepers inside Munich's Salvatorpassage. The rushes she envisioned for Kottbusser Tor, a square in Berlin, were an exception: the project never progressed beyond the planning stage. The art photographers Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky hired Giese to design their gardens; she also collaborated with Herzog & de Meuron architects, Basel, on several projects.
This book is a catalogue raisonné of sorts of Tita Giese's oeuvre. With contributions by Joachim Bessing, Robert Grunenberg, Thomas Ruff, and Pierre de Meuron, who says that her work his "unlike anyone else's in the world."