ALICE CHANNER
Megaflora
8 May – 28 September 2025
Venice, Natural History Museum “Giancarlo Ligabue”, Garden
Curated by Harry Woodlock
With the support of British Council
In collaboration with Konrad Fischer Galerie
For over fifteen years, Alice Channer, a leading contemporary British artist, has been making sculpture that represents nature in various states of transformation. Megaflora, 2021, is a sand-cast aluminium bramble stem that has been extracted via three-dimensional scan and stretched vertically into a three-meter-high freestanding sculptural form, and is presented here outside, in the Giardino di Ingresso of Museo di Storia Naturale di Venezia, for the very first time.
Alice Channer, Megaflora, 2021 (detail), © Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen
By way of scale or material, Channer transmogrifies the form, nature or appearance of the flora and fauna that makes up our natural world, in a surprising, and oftentimes magical, manner. In this sense her work speaks directly to the Museum’s rich, varied and fragile zoological, entomological and botanical collections and its evocative layout for discovering the secrets of nature and living beings. At the same time, it is also a comment on the way in which our environment has transformed, or adapted to, the human activity that has led to today’s climate crisis and the unprecedented threat capitalism is posing to nature.
For the first time, the sculpture is presented in an outdoor setting, powerfully showcasing the monumental evocative strength and the captivating ambiguity inherent in Channer’s work. Her art consistently operates at the boundary between the real and the artificial, between nature and its reconstruction using industrial materials, technology, or precious metals.
Alice Channer. Megaflora will examine the way in which the artist uses form so as to emphasise the violence of the current phenomenon of change, the protection it might be said to symbolise, and how we might rethink that which constitutes vulnerability today. This installation will be accompanied by a brand new publication, with contributions from authors such as art writer and broadcaster Louisa Buck.
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Alice Channer was born in Oxford, UK, in 1977. She lives and works on the edges of London. She graduated from Goldsmiths College, London (2006), with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art, from the Royal College of Art, London (2008), with a Master’s degree in Sculpture, and from the University of Sussex with a Bachelors degree in English Literature (1999).
Channer has exhibited internationally in numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions including the Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany; Tate Britain, London, UK, and Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany. Most recently she presented Heavy Metals / Silk Cut, a major mid-career survey, at Kunstmuseum and Kunsthalle, Appenzell, Switzerland, accompanied by the artist’s first comprehensive monographic catalogue.
This solo installation marks the second time Channer has exhibited work in Venice under the auspices of Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, following the inclusion of four of the artist’s works in Senza respiro. Arte contemporaneo a Londra, a group exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro – International Gallery of Modern Art in 2019. In addition, she also participated in Massimiliano Gioni’s 55th Venice Biennale exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico in 2013.