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GIOVANNI ALOI teaches art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. He is the author of numerous books and essays about the intersection of nature, science, and art.
Whatever one thinks of Freud's nudes, it may come as a surprise to learn that he was also a minor producer of still-lifes. This book presents 75 paintings and drawings of plants-some still-lifes per se and others works in which plants are generously displayed. -The Art Newspaper The year's most intriguingly sidelong take on the painter is entitled Lucian Freud Herbarium. Written by Giovanni Aloi, it begins with a potted history of plants in art, and then examines Freud's own use of plants, flowers, and vegetation in many of his paintings. -Hyperallergic Aloi's focus on plants makes one look again at familiar paintings and provides the opportunity to view others, many of them from private collections, that are equally extraordinary but comparatively little known. -The Spectator ...bringing together the artist's paintings and drawings of plants...allows us insight into the quality and nature of Lucian Freud's looking, and through it to find pathos and subtlety in his portraits. -The Arts Desk
