The Ranch is pleased to announce You Can Dance if You Willow, the latest solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed artist Julius von Bismarck (b. 1983, Breisach am Rhein, Germany).

The exhibition, which will span The Ranch’s gallery spaces and grounds, premieres the artist’s newest and most ambitious outdoor sculpture, Free Willow—a living, 30-foot willow tree that will remain at The Ranch permanently and be activated for the first time during the exhibition’s opening on Saturday, August 9, 2025.

At first glance, Free Willow appears to be just that: a willow tree, calmly rooted in place. But then it begins to move. Its long branches sway and swing in smooth, rhythmic gestures, as if stirred by some inner impulse rather than the wind. The motion feels deliberate, even expressive. It’s surprising, uncanny even, to watch a tree behave as if it has decided to perform. In a sense, it has. von Bismarck has devised an underlying mechanical intervention that grants the willow the agency to do so. Beneath the surface and hidden from view, a motorized system sets the tree in motion, but the technology stays quietly out of sight. What the viewer sees is a tree moving of its own volition, swaying not because of environmental forces, but because it can—because it wants to. In doing so, the tree upends our assumptions about nature’s agency and, by extension, non-human sources of power and control. With Free Willow, the tree is granted the freedom to willow—to act, to dance, to be seen—not as a passive landscape, but as a performer.

The West Barn Center Gallery features the two-piece sculptural installation The Elephant in the Room (2023), marking only its second-ever presentation and its first outside Germany.

The installation pairs a taxidermied giraffe with a life-size replica of the bronze equestrian statue of Otto von Bismarck in Bremen, Germany. At first, the sculptures appear as static until they begin to collapse inward, only to rise again, rebuilding themselves in a continuous cycle of rise and fall. Towering over the viewer and barely contained within the gallery space, the sculptures evoke early childhood memories of segmented push toys, the direct inspiration for von Bismarck’s piece, comically switched in scale between human and toy.

The collapse speed is unique to each figure, creating an ever-shifting relationship between them. At times, the two collapse in unison; at others, one remains upright while the other crumbles. What once happened easily in the palm of a hand is now transformed into a monumental, choreographed process, scaling up the toy to an architectural level.

At its core, The Elephant in the Room questions how monuments function and what roles they play in shaping collective memory and social identity. The statue of Otto von Bismarck references the instrumentalization of Germany’s first chancellor in constructing a specific national narrative—a historical legacy that endures today. Meanwhile, the giraffe serves as a monument to a romanticized and exoticist past, blurring the lines between natural history and colonial violence. Together, they interrogate the power and fragility of symbolic structures.

The West Barn Side Galleries present a focused selection of photo-based works that highlight von Bismarck’s ambitious multimedia practice.

This selection of photo-based work critically engages with calamities of history while challenging the concept of nature as a human construct, both as visual phenomena and as entangled forces. Through research-driven experimentation, von Bismarck’s practice spans photography, film, installation, sculpture, performance, and landscape interventions. His work explores the shifting intersections between nature and civilization, knowledge and imagination, behavior and social norms: forces that underpin his nomadic approach to artmaking. The artist also draws on his dual background in science and art to operate between fields, ultimately questioning systems of perception and representation through poetic and often uncanny means.

Among these is the striking series Tiere sind Engel mit Fell (Animals Are Angels with Fur), in which various animals—a fox, a raccoon, and a stork—appear to float weightlessly in space. Their suspension recalls astronauts adrift in space, or thrillseekers skydiving from a plane: in reality they are floating in a vertical wind tunnel. The lifeless fur of the taxidermized animals seems animated by an invisible life force, inciting a variety of reactions in the viewer that range from pity and joy to empathy. A permissive idea is established that the animal is no longer undignified in its death and a false sense of balance is restored.

Also included in the exhibition is the newest large-scale photograph from the artist’s ongoing Landscape Painting series. The fifth iteration of this body of work was created on the walls of one of the oldest mining sites in the Brembana Valley, in Dossena, Italy in May 2025. Using a meticulous process of hand-painted lines and hatching, von Bismarck visually flattened the three-dimensional quarry into a pictorial surface, referencing the visual languages of 18th- and 19th-century landscape engraving and naturalist studies. The resulting photographic work translates this ephemeral, site-specific intervention into a lasting image—rendering it at once documentation and autonomous artwork. The original painting remains permanently on view as part of Thinking Like a Mountain, a cultural program initiated by the Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery in Bergamo. Through this series, von Bismarck questions the role of landscape as image, myth, and resource—revealing its layered artifice and ideological weight.

The presentation at The Ranch provides a comprehensive overview of Julius von Bismarck’s multi-media output, bringing into critical focus and disrupting human and non-human modes of perception, historical superstructures, and myth.

About the Artist

Julius von Bismarck is a graduate of the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and the Institute for Spatial Experiments, founded by Olafur Eliasson, with whom he studied during his Master’s program.

He has presented solo exhibitions at Berlinische Galerie; Bundeskunsthalle; Palais de Tokyo; Kunstpalais Erlangen; Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg; Artothek Kunstverein Göttingen; and Kunstverein Arnsberg, among others. Upcoming solo exhibitions in 2025 and 2026 are scheduled in Austria, Australia, and China.

Von Bismarck has participated in numerous international group exhibitions, including at the Palais de Tokyo and the 1st Antarctic Biennale at the Venice Biennale (2017). He received the Ars Electronica award in 2008 for his project Image Fulgurator and was the first artist-in- residence at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 2012. He lives and works in Berlin.