X-Ray Flora And Fauna Come Together As Art

Dutch physicist turned artist makes X-ray prints of beautiful scenes of nature.

July 7, 2014, 7:50pm

Fairly uncommon among the visual arts canon, X-ray artworks certainly do pop up from time to time, ranging from colorized X-ray portraits to digital digital X-ray mirrors. While fauna— and sometimes even animal-human amalgamated hybrids— can be the subjects of these works, very rarely have flora been X-rayed for artistic purposes.

Arie van ’t Riet, a Dutch physicist who specializes in low-energy radiology, decided to intersect X-rays with plant and animal life forms in a series of works that bring art together with science in a refreshing manner. The works show X-rays of a variety of animals including iguanas and ducks, amongst an even more variegated group of plants. Certain portions of the flora and fauna are colorized through Photoshop, resulting in fantastic polychromatic fragments amongst the traditional monochromatic tones of X-rays.

Riet had never intended to be an artist. It was only after a friend of his asked the radiologist to X-ray one of his paintings that his artistic possibilities came to light. Realizing that other thin materials could be X-rayed, Riet began working with flowers and soon after with entire scenes of nature, resulting in these stunning works he fittingly dubs “bioramas.”