The subjects and stories of David Hartt’s oeuvre are presented through many media, including video, photography, architecture, music and sculpture. For many years, Hartt has utilized photography to produce monumental tapestries of great visual and surface complexity which immerse the viewer in the landscape on view. He investigates the unwritten histories of social and cultural situations through a truly unique sense of photography. His juxtapositions of 19th and 20th century environments in particular provoke us to question our common history. Nature has always intrigued thinkers of the past – from Aristotle to Jean-Jacques Rousseau – and the question of how it can nourish us and how we must respect and protect it.

This new tapestry by David Hartt is from his "Naturphilosophie" series. The series is comprised of images of plants photographed at various sites in Northern Europe, such as The Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany, and this image was taken by Hartt in Heemstede in the Netherlands in 2023. The image of large, leafy plants and dandelions from a low-to-the-ground perspective is compositionally engaging in its structure and its contrasts between light and dark. Albrecht Dürer, early naturalists, 19th-century German Romantic painters like Georg Kolbe and Caspar David Friedrich, and various writers were also captivated by nature; these predecessors in turn inspired the greatest American landscape painters of the 19th century such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt, among others.

Hartt enters this tradition through this series, which brings the peripheral, non-human agents of nature into focus. His images reflect on how our environment and the life present in it has historically been shaped by changes on our planet by phenomena like the ice age, volcanoes, and rivers, as well as by human activity and ideals of the past. In doing so, it brings into focus how these interferences have their resonances in our landscape and environment today.