The Flower as Image – Revue – UK

Why has the floral motif fascinated artists all over the world throughout history? The answer is complex and twofold: On the one hand, the flower is an easily accessible motif that simply serves as a pretext for the artist to create his work. On the other hand, the flower has been seen as a symbol of sensuality, beauty, human existence, transience, death, the course of life, love, sexuality, women, artificiality, diversity, innocence and paradise. So it is not surprising that flowers continue to play a role in art, because they are expressions of some fundamental human phenomena.

The Flowers as Image is the English edition of Louisiana Revy no. 45, published in connection with the museum's exhibition in 2004/05 – The Flower as Image. The overall idea of the exhibition was to show that the flower functions as a pictorial representation of the process of creating art, and that it reflects many of the artistic considerations that modern artists have made.

In an attempt to shed light on this, the audience is taken through 20th-century art in the fields of painting, sculpture, photography, installation and video, and is presented with approximately 100 works by some of the world's greatest artists, including Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Emil Nolde and Georgia O'Keeffe , and more recent artists such as Sigmar Polke, Irving Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Hockney and Andy Warhol - all the way to young contemporary artists - Pipilotti Rist, Marc Quinn, Beatriz Milhazes and Nobuyoshi Araki.