Matthias Korb, Museum INITIUM ET FINIS

all  images courtesy of Matthias Korb

Located in the small community of Lohrheim, Germany, some 70 km north-west of Frankfurt am Main, above pictured house is home to an art environment in the capacity of a museum, named INITIUM ET FINIS (Beginning and end). As a further indication the complement Wunderkammer der Humanität (Wunderkammer of Humanity) is often added.

The museum, a private affair, was developed from 2008 on, when Matthias Korb bought a house in Lohrheim when he needed more space to further develop his artistic activities, which he had started in 2005.

Life and works

Matthias Korb was born in 1969 in Frankfurt am Main.

Already at a young age he was concerned with man and his place in the system of nature and how that was expressed, for example, in the way gardens were laid out in the era of the Renaissance compared to the contemporary way of working.

By this interest he was inspired to look for a job in the field of landscape gardening. In his late twenties, in 1997, he started his own business in this area.

With the same interest in mind, for a number of years Korb was also involved in publishing books, while in 2005, without any education at an art school, he started to focus on the creation of visual art.

In the early phase of his artistic career. Matthias Korb liked to make assemblies, giving found objects  a new meaning by letting nature appear in the background decoration that can consist of a mixture of paint and different forms of earth.

There also is a relation with his job as landscaper in so far that  the way he arranges his assemblages corresponds to the way he designs a garden with lines, colors and forms. 

In this period Matthias Korb, as a self-taught artist, already participated in various expositions in Germany. 

Creating an art environment

In 2008 Matthias Korb took a different direction in his artistic activities, when he began to transform the various rooms in his house in Lohrheim into an art environment, doing this by adding a variety of items to the interior walls, as shown in the images around...

He gathered these items finding them by chance in nature, during his work, on the dump, but mostly at flea markets in Frankfurt, a town where he often came because of his work.

However, he would also search consciously for specific items if they would fit in with the concept of an assemblage he had in mind to make.

Some of the rooms in the house have been transformed into salons with dark red painted walls. Such a salon may be equipped with black painted furniture and wall cupboards which give the room a 19th century look.

Smaller items, such as framed photos on the wall, reinforce this allure

In this way an art environment was created, consisting of an overwhelming collection of objects, fixed to walls or displayed in 19th century wall cabinets, all items that surround people or are made or used to go through life.

Matthias Korb has been writing so-called life books throughout his life. That is to say: books in which he wrote diary entries, poems, and aphorisms, as well as pasted drawings, pictures, and photos.

Starting in 2014, he began to feature these books in films.

So in a video released in 2023 Matthias Korb published a compilation of a kind of diary in which he recorded thoughts and reflections he had in the years 1919 to 1923, entitled Das Inititium als Substitut einer Biografie (The Initiation as a substitute of a biography)..

In the years 2023/2024 he worked with a lot of energy, perseverance and creativity on decorating a part of the house in a style that deviates somewhat from the previously followed line.

Of this creative project a video was made, entitled Bewusstsein der Welt, a video that was released in March 1925 (see documentation). 

The video, shot by Peter Kunz, does not show decorations by items of daily life, but opens with images of a decoration in the capacity of a large technical installation full of wires and other connections, a scene that is followed by a decoration in the capacity of a piece of machinery designated as Schwache Kernkraft (Weak nuclear power).

And so the video goes on.

There is a decoration called Dunkle Materie (Dark Matter) and another one named Starke Kernkraft (Strong Nuclear Power), just as there is also a decoration that indicates the boundary of man, where the soulish begins and the corporeal ends.

The images shown in the video are impressive in their generally complex and unusual composition,

so just think about what visitors experience when they see the creations in reality. 

What is depicted here in terms of items transcends the everyday, domestic decorative items

and addresses the essence of human life..

Matthias Korb himself gave the following elucidation of the recent expansion of his art environment: 

"The room you can see in this movie is God's brain, the center of the INITIUM. 

It is the work of art: world body..

It begins with man's entry into the consciousness of the world. You enter all levels of consciousness of the brain. All material, as well as all spiritual structures, have their origin here. The creation of the world with all its ramifications. 

Millions of options for the future of the universe are theoretically played through in advance. And after this journey through time, the machine writes its destination on the wall: world redemption"

As said, the museum is also indicated as a Wunderkammer der Humanität.

The German concept Wunderkammer (Room of wonders) refers to a phenomenon from earlier centuries, when collections were set up -initially by royal people, later also by rich civilians- which included artworks, but also miraculous and everyday things.

However, the use of the Wunderkammer concept is not intended to give shape to longing back to the past. Matthias Korb's art environment is a Gesamtkunstwerk that -using the Wunderkammer concept- investigates the relationship between mankind and all that it surrounds. The expansion of the exhibition with the 2023/2024 creations gives shape to this concept in an inspiring way. 

Other than joining this process of ongoing specialization, the Museum Initium et Finis bears witness to a development that is going in a completely opposite direction, that of generalization.

This does not alter the fact that visiting the museum can contribute to thinking about earlier times or about the situation of mankind in the contemporary world. In good weather the garden of the museum offers the visitor a suitable place to reflect about these topics.

portrait of Matthias Korb

Documentation

* Website of the museum

* Article (July 2014) in regional journal Frankfurter Neue Presse

* Article (December 2023) on the website Tattoo Lifestyle

* Article (Summer 2024) by Rolf Bruggemann in Raw Vision nr 119

Video

* Video Bewusstsein der Welt (YouTube, March 2025, 4'42") by Peter Kunz

first published March 2019, last revised April 2025

Matthias Korb

INITIUM ET FINIS. Wunderkammer der Humanität

2 Bartelstrasse

65558 Lohrheim, Rhineland Palatinate Federal State, Germany
can only be visited on appointment, 18 years and older

(art@initium-et-finis.de)

Bogosav Živković, Магиц гарден / Magic garden

pictures are screen prints (2016)

from the video by GEM Televizija (see documentation)

The picture above shows part of Bogosav Živković's Magic Garden in Serbia as it appeared in a video made by a regional TV company in 2016, at the occasion of the re-opening of the site, which dates back from the 1970's

Life and works

Bogosav Živković (1920-2005) was born in a poor family in Leskovac, a community in  Serbia, some fifty kilometers south of its capital Belgrade. He worked as a farmhand and as a leather worker.

When in 1941, at the beginning of the Second World War, Serbia was occupied by Germany, parts of the country had to suffer from cruel treatments of the occupying forces and as a young man Živković was seriously traumatized by a malicious treatment by German occupiers.

This trauma would stay with him all his life. It also made him decide in 1945 at age 25, to leave his job as a leather worker and move to Belgrade, where he found a job as a porter.

 

Living in Belgrade, in the mid 1950s Živković began feeling attracted to making visual art. His development as a self-taught artist has often been associated with the traumas he had sustained in the beginning of the war. What he saw and experienced in restless dreams and troubled nightmares was at the basis of his creations.

Živković made his first sculpture in 1957. Already in 1960 he had his first independent exhibition and soon he was seen in Serbia as an important artist in naive and marginal art.

During his life he had exhibitions in many European countries and his work was bought by various European museums in the field of naive and marginal art. The Museum of Naive and Marginal Art in Jagodina, Serbia, has an important collection of his works.

Creating a sculpture garden

In the late 1960s Živković returned to his birthplace Leskovac. He was now married and in 1965 he had finished his job as a porter. With his wife Dobrita he went to live in the house where he was born.

On the premises of this house, a simple structure built in the early years of the 20th century, there are also a few other buildings, such as a barn of some 5 x 3 meter -built before 1940- that was used as a winery and some other small buildings named after the way they have been decorated, such as the house with a sun, where Živković had his studio, and the house with a face.

Other smaller items and structures also gave the garden its own character, such as two bread ovens, an outdoor dining room, a fountain and a stone composition for sitting.

All these elements are part of the almost 100 m² large garden of the property, which Živković together with his wife, in the 1970s began to transform into an art environment.

Živković himself indicated the site as Museum of Folk Art "Golden Branch", but generally it has become known as Magic Garden.

Dobrita Živković took care of the landscaping of the site, adding flowers and plants, including lushly growing ivy that especially would appeal to visitors.

Živković himself installed a variety of his sculptures in the garden. He probably did not consider the decorated garden as an art environment, at that time in Serbia perhaps also an unknown concept, but as a museum and exposition facility in the open air. He installed a variety of his sculptures in the garden, that are an integral part of this art environment

As the pictures in this post show, Živković also decorated the walls of the various buildings with murals and carved reliefs, He also added various structures from stone to the garden

It has been noted that although the various buildings in the garden each have no specific artistic significance, the site as a whole during Živković’s life had a pleasant, atmospheric and valuable artistic appearance.

During Živković’s life the Magic Garden gained a good reputation and attracted all kinds of visitors, including high-ranking guests of Yugoslavia or Serbia, such as emperor Hirohito of Japan, emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and president Jimmy Carter of the United States.

After Bogosav Živković in 2005 had died, a period of uncertainty began regarding the further development of the site. In 2006, an institute in Belgrade, charged with the protection of cultural monuments, offered to undertake maintenance of the site, but at that time it was not possible for the institute to enter the property to do technical research and measurements.

In 2013 the Belgrade institute renewed the procedure, which resulted in an extensive study of what should be done to restore the site. An article (2017) by Nada N. Živković (see documentation) had a summary of the proposed approach. At the time of editing this entry, the situation with regard to decision-making about a renovation is not clear

In all likelihood, in the years after the death of Živković, the garden was not or only irregularly open to visitors. However, the video from which the images in this article are derived, was released in 2016 on the occasion of the reopening of the site in that year.

Documentation
* Article (2017) on SCIndeks, the central site of scientific publications in Serbia, by Nada N. Živković. "The magic garden of Bogosav Živković in Leskovac- status and protection"

* Article by Nina Krstic "The Golden Bough of Bogosav Živković" in Raw Vision #110 (spring 2022)

Video
* Video (2'27", November 2016) by GEM Televizija, on Vimeo 

Bogosav Živković

Magic garden

Leskovac, Serbia
in 2016 re-opened for visitors

Roselyne Descamps, Jardin décoré de la Villa Kernetra / Villa Kernetra's decorated garden

"map of the world" under construction

all pictures from Facebook 

The picture above shows a creation named Map of the World  under construction. It is one of the cercles (circular thematic sites) included in Roselyne Descamps' decorated garden around the Villa Kernetra, which is located in the community of Lanvollon in Brittany, France.

This cercle consists of a female statue surrounded by a circle of stones and benches on which a frieze will run with the twelve signs of the zodiac.

another view of the "map of the world"

Life and works

Born in May 1946, Roselyne Descamps studied at the University of Rennes, Brittany, being educated as a botanist. She was a horticultural trainer at an employment pole in Guingamp and conservator of the Kerdalo Gardens in Trédarzec.

In 1978, when she was in her early thirties, she could buy Villa Kernetra in Lanvollon. By this time Roselyne had also become skilled in making ceramics. Her qualities as botanist and ceramist, combined with a lively interest in myths, legends and tales of the Breton past, would have a major influence on her further life and the special development of the garden around Villa Kernetra.

 another specific site in the garden 
is the "Templar garden"

This villa was built in 1890 on a spot where in the seventh century a monastery -founded by an Irish monk- was located. The garden of the property, over one hectare in size and separated from the street by a 40 meters long brick wall, was very suitable to realize Roselyne's idea to create a symbolic and thematic garden in the spirit of Niki de Saint Phalle's Tarot Garden, facteur Cheval's Palais Idéal or Robert Tatin's Musée.

 the cloister is a place of meditation and contemplation, 
gathering stones that originally were scattered all over the garden

The garden was also transformed in botanical terms, for a part because of the damage caused by the great storm of 1987 that struck Brittany, but above all to give expression to contemplative and mythical concepts, reflected in special arrangements of trees and shrubs, such as the clairière des  druides (clearing of the druids) -a collection of large trees in an arc- created in 1990-1992, a collection of hellebore under a weeping beech or palms and laurels planted in memory of the Templars and the cathedrals they built.

 the circle of druids 

Mosaics on a brick wall and other creations in the garden

Assisted by volunteers,  Roselyne Descamps from around 2011 until 2015 has been building a wall of about 70 meters long, made of white blocks of stone. This wall, which meanders through the garden and fits smoothly into it's landscape, is a decorative and -in sacral respect- a protective structure. In practical terms it offers the opportunity to fix the many mosaics that in the course of the years have been created to adorn the garden.

Here is a small selection of these mosaics and other creations that decorate the garden.

fresque des Preuses Cavalières

The picture above shows part of a group of all together nine Preuses Cavalières. Historically seen these are ladies, in general from aristocratic origin, who shared a chivalrous ideal and organized tournaments or formed part of military orders. The scene is based upon an Italian wall painting in the Castello della Manta Museum near Saluzzo in the Piedmont region in Italy.  

On the wall of white blocks the visitor will see a large number of mosaics and frescoes of cards 

from the Tarot. 

Above a a combination of dark blue mosaic made from sandstone, glazed at 1260°,

representing card number 20, the Jugement.

Left above the Zodiac sign Le Bélier (in English: Aries) created by Gérard Buissonnière, an artist from Paimpol. As it is the first astrological sign of the zodiac, Aries marks renewal and beginning. 

Right above the Egyptian deity Apis, in the shape of a bull with horns.

Above a sculpture of Medusa, a monstrous appearance in Greek mythology with hair of winding snakes. In the setting of the garden this creation also represents tarot card number 8, Justice.

The above multicolored glass mosaic depicts a dragon, a creature that in the western world since the rise of Christendom represents evil and is synonymous with demons. 

Below a mosaic with blue elements depicting a tree. 

Since 2013 the garden is registered in the Guide des céramistes de France. It can be visited on open days or on appointment

Documentation

* Article (May 2010) in Breton journal Le Télégramme

* Article (October 2013) in journal Ouest-France

* Article (October 2015) also in journal Ouest-France

* Article (June 2017) in Breton journal Le Télégramme

Roselyne Descamps

Jardin décoré de la Villa Kernetra

10, rue des Fontaines

22290 Lanvollon, dept Côtes d'Armor, region Brittany, France

can be visited on open days or on appointment