BADEN-BADEN.- The Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden has opened Bloom up! The Language of Flowers, a major special exhibition of the State of Baden-Württemberg that brings together contemporary art and cultural history through one of the most familiar, seductive and symbolically charged motifs in human culture: the flower.

On view through January 10, 2027, the exhibition marks the first major cooperation between the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and the Badisches Landesmuseum. Rather than following a chronological path, Bloom up! places historic objects from the museum’s collections in dialogue with works by contemporary artists, creating unexpected conversations across centuries, materials and meanings.

Few images are as universal as the flower. It appears in love rituals, religious stories, political ceremonies, domestic decoration, mourning practices and commercial exchange. Flowers can suggest beauty and tenderness, but also possession, power, violence, memory and resistance. The exhibition uses this broad symbolic range to explore how flowers have carried meaning across different cultures and periods.

Prof. Dr. Eckart Köhne, who has directed both the Badisches Landesmuseum and the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden together with Susanne Schulenburg since 2025, described the collaboration as both a challenge and an enrichment. With Bloom up!, he said, the institutions aim to encourage reflection, discussion and sensual experience.

The exhibition begins with flowers as symbols of love and relationships, moving from a traditional regional setting into a contemporary global context. Richly decorated farmhouse cupboards from the 18th and 19th centuries, once associated with love, fertility, prosperity and wedding customs, are shown alongside monumental floral sculptures by Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano. Their works, rooted in private moments from the artists’ relationship, transform intimacy into an expansive public gesture.

Scent also plays an important role in the exhibition. Norwegian artist and researcher Sissel Tolaas created a new olfactory work in response to late medieval stained-glass windows from Freiburg and Constance. One window, based on a design by Hans Baldung Grien, depicts the legend of Saint Dorothy, who is associated with a basket of roses. Tolaas responds not simply to the image of the flower, but to the window’s material history, its aging and the traces of time embedded in it.

The exhibition also looks at the darker side of floral symbolism. Belia Zanna Geetha Brückner’s series Hard to Say I’m Sorry is presented in dialogue with The Pilgrim in the Garden, the well-known Art Nouveau tapestry by Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. Where the tapestry presents a woman as a passive rose awaiting conquest, Brückner’s bouquets address gestures of apology within toxic and violent relationships, exposing the uneasy underside of romance, admiration and reconciliation.

Willem de Rooij contributes a critical examination of “whiteness,” understood as a social construct in which white culture and white people are treated as the norm while others are marked as different. His Bouquet IX, made entirely of white flowers, appears alongside Whites from his Weavings series. For the exhibition, de Rooij also examined historical photographic collections from southwestern Germany held by the Landesstelle für Alltags- und Regionalkultur in Staufen, using them to further question the visual and social codes of whiteness.

Georgian artist Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili approaches a late medieval Pietà through photographic details rather than through the sculpture as a whole. Her images focus on a hand, a fold of fabric and the back of the work, drawing attention to elements often overlooked. The tulips painted on Mary’s cloak create a link to another of Alexi-Meskhishvili’s photographic series. In Georgia, the tulip is associated with resistance, mourning and collective memory.

Other contemporary voices in the exhibition include Jonas Mekas, whose Requiem opens another meditation on flowers and remembrance; Allora & Calzadilla, whose installation expands the exhibition’s spatial and political dimensions; and Taryn Simon, whose photographic work examines the role of floral arrangements in rituals of diplomacy, power and statecraft.

One of the exhibition’s highlights is a large silk cover embroidered with different types of flowers and crowns. Believed to come from Lichtental Abbey and preserved in exceptional condition, the rare object is being shown publicly for the first time.

Bloom up! also includes a Studio section devoted to further aspects of the cultural history of flowers. Among the objects on view are ancient votive offerings with lotus blossoms from Cyprus and a myrtle diadem once owned by Grand Duchess Luise of Baden.

The exhibition extends beyond the gallery through a dedicated app, which offers audio guides, studio visits and digital tools for experiencing the show in new ways. Visitors can use a group mode with games and voting features, while a dating mode invites them to discover both the exhibition and one another.

An accompanying program includes guided tours, discussions and creative workshops. A new Silent Hour format offers a deliberately low-stimulus way to experience the exhibition, while family tours and Bring Your Baby tours make the show accessible to visitors with young children.

Bloom up! The Language of Flowers is on view at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden through January 10, 2027.