Brennende Zypressen im Glaskasten

Brennende Zypressen im Glaskasten brings together two recurring motifs in Nikolai’s practice. The cypress carries its long association with mourning and mortality, but is also connected to autobiographical places of memory in the Mediterranean. It therefore appears neither as a general symbol nor as landscape alone, but as a form in which personal and cultural memory overlap.

The glass case creates a contradictory condition. It protects and displays, while simultaneously establishing distance. What is held inside can be observed but not fully reached; preservation becomes inseparable from isolation.

The burning cypresses interrupt any promise of permanence. Fire turns memory into an active process rather than a sealed object. The work holds grief, transformation and observation within the same enclosure, asking whether something can remain protected without also being removed from life.