COPENHAGEN, DENMARK.- The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art presents The Flower as Image, on vie through January 16, 2005. In its choice of theme, the autumns big exhibition at Louisiana, The Flower as Image , provides a classic frame story for modern art over the past 150 years with the flower motif as its focus. The overall idea of the exhibition is to show that the flower functions as an image of the creation of art itself, and that in many ways it reflects the aesthetic thinking of modern artists. In an attempt to illuminate this the public is guided through the art of the twentieth century painting, sculpture, photography, installation and video and is presented with about a hundred works by some of the greatest artists in the world.
Why has the flower motif fascinated all sorts of artists through the ages? The answer is twofold: on the one hand the flower is an easily accessible motif that simply functions as a pretext for the artist to create a 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, woman, artificiality, diversity, innocence and Paradise. As such it is not so strange that flowers continue to play a role in art, for they express certain fundamental human phenomena. And it is this inherent duality that makes the flower one of the most complex motifs of all and makes it suitable for raising certain fundamental issues in aesthetics and art history.
The Flower as Image gathers together all the qualities of the flower motif and arranges them in a large bouquet. It is an exhibition where the visitor will be taken on a pleasure trip through works by classic masters like Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin, and can follow the perspectives from there into modern art with Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Emil Nolde and Georgia OKeeffe as well as more recent artists like Sigmar Polke, Irving Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Hockney and Andy Warhol all the way up to the young contemporary artists Pipilotti Rist, Marc Quinn, Beatriz Milhazes and Nobuyoshi Araki, who have grasped the flower even more firmly as a subject and given it a particularly central position in todays visual reality. The pleasure tour will be a joy to the eye, for the traditional beauty of the motif is something the artists can rarely escape, but it is also the ambition of the exhibition to highlight how the flower motif also gives the artists an opportunity to think about what it actually means to create a work of art and how a motif that seems quite innocent on the surface carries within it a great narrative of the development of art and sheds light on both classic modern art and contemporary art.
The exhibition is being organised in collaboration with Fondation Beyeler, Basel and is curated by the Exhibition Curator Ernst Jonas Bencard and Louisianas Director Poul Erik Tjner.
