Fragrantarium

Julia Asenbaum is a botanist, and she wanted to know what a flower really smells like — not the cliché, but molecule by molecule. Using “headspace” analysis, she captures the scent of living plants and whole landscapes and rebuilds it as perfume; she calls it “Olfactory Realism.” Her most famous piece: Klimt’s Rose, reconstructed from the scent of a rose bush still growing in Gustav Klimt’s last studio garden in Vienna — the very one he painted in 1912. A Viennese one-woman house, founded in 2018, on the border of science and art.