Sharon Core, 1634
It’s probably the biggest celebration of flowers ever put together. The Saatchi Gallery in London is exploring “flora in contemporary art & culture” through the lens of 500 works from across the ages and cultures, from Damien Hirst and Murakami, and from Viviane Sassen to Yayoi Kusama and even philosopher Rudolph Steiner. Simply titled “Flowers”, the monumental show is looking at the way flowers have been an influence in culture and how they have been celebrated in painting, photography, film, sculpture, fashion, literature, even by the music industry. It is looking at flowers’ omnipresence in contemporary culture. Throughout time and culture, flowers have been utilized as metaphors for human emotions - love, purity, loyalty, etc. - and symbols. They are also conveyors of messages - think about the hippies’ “Flower Power” or Mao’s “Hundred Flowers campaign”: “Let 100 flowers bloom in social science and arts,” which became a call which triggered the cultural revolution.
Martin Schoeller, Jeff Koons with Floral Headpiece, New York 2013
The exhibition is divided into 9 rooms, each exploring a different theme. The first one, Roots, establishes the history of artists painting flowers and the depiction of their symbolic powers, from the Renaissance to the 19th Century’s Arts & Craft movement.
The second room, Bloom, looks at works from contemporary artists from the past 30 years. The third room examines the connection between flowers and fashion as well as jewellery. The fourth room presents flowers through photography and sculpture. The fifth space is a site specific installation over 2,000sqft by Rebecca Louise Law, who has created an immersive work, featuring 100,000 dried flowers. There's also another immersive gallery, a sort of virtual garden created by artist Miguel Chevalier. The digital flowers interact with the movement of visitors in the room.
Rebecca Louis Law, The Womb
Another room demonstrates the importance of flowers in music, literature and film. A vinyl wall shows the prevalence of flowers on record covers over the past 50 years. The seventh gallery space created in collaboration with the Chelsea Physic Garden, is called Life & Death. It is looking at flowers from a medicinal and botanical perspective. It is even exploring the mathematical principles behind some natural phenomena, like the Fibonacci Sequence named after the 12th Century mathematician. The final room, New Shoots, features the work of up and coming artists.
A visit to the Saatchi gallery is a delightful way to remember the beauty of the natural world and an invitation to pay more attention to it, as plants are suffering even more than humans from climate change. They enchant our lives, let’s be respectful of them.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Daniel The Gardner, Tattoo Photography
Flowers - Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture. Until May 5. saatchigallery.com
Aimee Hoving, Compost, 2019
