The Language of Flowers

Curated  by Martin Bethenod, director of Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana,  “The Language of Flowers”, brings together at Gucci Museo the works of four artists, produced between 1967 and 2012, who play with the iconography of flowers, an allusion to one of Gucci’s most iconic motifs: Flora.

Above and beyond a motif that could be considered frivolous or banal, what in fact emerges are themes such as vanity, memory, politics and the value of art...

Valérie Belin, French photographer born in 1964, in Calendula (Marigold), 2010 and Phlox New Hybrid (with Dahlia Redskin), 2010, combines the female face with floral motifs, creating types of hybrids (in the botanical sense) marked by the ambiguity between human and plant, nature and artifice, real and virtual, presence and absence, seduction and coldness. Einder, 2007–2008, by Marlene Dumas (born in South Africa in 1953) harbors a melancholy secret: this flower arrangement, floating on a sea of midnight blue, was placed upon the coffin of the artist’s mother, who died shortly before. Beyond its beauty and delicate colors, it speaks of memory, grief and mourning.

The main material of Fantôme (Jasmin), 2012, by Latifa Echakhch (born in Morocco in 1974), is the jasmine flower, or more precisely, the flower necklaces that street vendors offer to passers-by in Middle Eastern towns and cities. The work is linked to one of the artist’s memories: that of a travelling jasmine salesman in Beirut who covered his flowers with a shirt to protect their scent and freshness. Beyond its apparent fragility, this sculpture evokes the revolutions of the Arab Spring and the resistance to chaos. The flowers become a political metaphor.

The two diptychs by the great American photographer Irving Penn (1917-2009), Cottage Tulip, Sorbet, New York, 1967 and Single Oriental Poppy, 1968, were composed using the principle of combining a black-and-white picture with the same image in color. By virtue of the classicism of their composition and the extreme attention paid to their printing (platinum printing for the black and white, dye transfer for the color), both of these historical pieces show the dimension of complete formal control and the search for absolute perfection, as well as the awareness of the passing of time and the vanity of everything, which so profoundly mark the works of this master photographer.

March 13 – September 20, 2015
The Language of Flowers
curated by Martin Bethenod
Gucci Museo
Piazza della Signoria, Firenze