FLOWERS – FLORA IN CONTEMPORARY ART & CULTURE @ The Saatchi Gallery
Flowers and floral motifs have always been a dominant stimuli within the scope of art history and pop culture. Evocative for their seemingly endless and undulating layers of possible meaning; flowers are life giving, ephemeral, sometimes poisonous, and an eternal personification of the brevity of beauty.
Alma Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus, 1888. Oil on canvas, 132.7 cm × 214.4 cm. Private collection. Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons.
Those who attended the opening event of Saatchi Gallery’s FLOWERS – FLORA IN CONTEMPORARY ART & CULTURE, in the bustling heart of Sloane Square, were given a generously assembled complementary bouquet. Stuffed with long spindling stems and tropical blooms, these luxurious bouquets were an apt precursor to the exhibition. Alas, my friend and I did not arrive in time to receive our bouquets and had to longingly gape at those who passed us with theirs in hand. Luckily, this did not dampen our visit as there was much to come by in the way of floral delights.
The multifaceted show, spanning two floors and nine gallery spaces, endeavours to convey the enduring presence of flowers in art and culture. The exhibition showcases large-scale installations, contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, fashion, archival objects, and graphic design. Featuring over 500 works across nine themed sections—including Roots, In Bloom, Flowers and Fashion, and Science: Life & Death—the exhibition offers varied perspectives. Collaborations with institutions and designers like Marimekko and a photographic showcase from Flora Imaginaria, curated by Danaé Panchaud and William Ewing, in partnership with the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (FEP). A key highlight which greets visitors with near immediacy upon entering the gallery space is La Fleur Morte (2025). This installation, by Rebecca Louise Law, is made of 100,000 carefully hung dried flowers, forming a great autumnal blanket or blushes and browns ready to swallow the room and those in it. If the title was not a dead give away (pun intended), La Fleur Morte explores the interplay between life and death, and the everlasting tether between humanity and nature in our shared ephemerality.
Installation view, Rebecca Louise Law, La Fleur Morte, 2025. Photo Courtesy: the artist’s website.
In Room 3, a group of mannequins take on slack poses, draped in complex swags of floral brocade and belted in plumes of pastel tulle, they form a biomorphic procession themselves. This section, aptly titled ‘Flowers and Fashion’, conveys the continuous reference to the forms, movement, and colours of nature; an aesthetic which has occupied the minds of artists since the genesis of textile and clothing design.
A piece that was instantly recognisable from its previous appearance at Frieze London was Stephanie Comilang’s Babylon Bloom (2004), a denim textile swath, on which the Canadian artist embroidered powder blue chrysanthemums and orange Awapuhi. The found denim material is a reference to the trade and labour associated with the practice of dying using the natural blue pigment, indigo. The roots of this plant’s history are intertwined with that of South Asia and colonialism, a theme Comilang confidently explores in much of her oeuvre.
The displays in Room 6 explore the use of flower imagery in film, music, and literature. The space includes a grid of sorts, displaying various movie posters and music album covers which used the imagery of flowers and nature in their designs. From the flirtatious abundance of red rose petals in the poster of Sam Mendes’s controversial 1999 film American Beauty, described in its accompanying caption as a symbol of sex and fertility, to the more ghoulish and arresting red blossom in the poster for Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest, which follows the idyllic lives of Nazi Rudolf Höss and his family at their home next to Auschwitz, released in 2023. Shuddering away from the posters, I looked to my friend, who, with bright eyes, pointed to all the music albums she knows and loves, including Kate Bush’s The Sensual World (1989), where the large flower she holds to her face becomes symbolic of her femininity and sensuality.
Installation view. FLOWERS – FLORA IN CONTEMPORARY ART & CULTURE. Photo Courtesy: Abigail Mansfield.
A kind of conceptually cooling salve positioned in parallel to the room displaying a number of paintings on the upper floor, to include a monumental tempera work on linen canvas carefully blotted with swelling and bruised blossoms of various confectionery colours by Berlin based artist Jan Sebastian Koch titled Spring, is a room which explores flowers and their pharmaceutical properties (The Flower Pharmacy). The artwork and books curated for this section were lent by Chelsea Physic Garden, and texts were adapted from writings of the Royal Academy of Physicians. The accompanying caption refers to the historical and contemporary uses of flowers for remedying ailments, and vaguely nods to the misuse of substances for their psychoactive effects. In the centre of the space, we came across the Hortus Sanitatis (The Garden of Health), a leatherbound book of medicinal botany printed in 1491, opened to a page with fascinating woodcuts of anthropomorphic herbs. While this was a cool thing to behold after the onslaught of contemporary works, we felt somewhat thrown off by the sudden drastic temporal shift, despite understanding that the curators desired a comprehensive show encapsulating the breadth of flowers’ presence within art history.
Jan Sebastian Koch, Spring. Egg tempera and oil pastel on linen. Photo Courtesy: Abigail Mansfield.
Although the exhibition was fundamentally successful in its aesthetic, chromatically arresting and surely stimulating, I spent a great deal of my visit wondering if its enormity and the number of explored genres overwhelmed and diluted the potency of the show’s message. The plaques accompanying every room attempt to hammer home the fact that flowers can be found in every corner of creative expression, all echoing the same “life vs. death” dichotomy soberly represented in Room 5’s installation—was the coverage of every human mode of intellectual exploration and expression entirely necessary?
Despite my skepticism, I also noticed that many of the works drew directly from psychedelia, causing me to speculate whether or not the show was cleverly timed in coordination with the socio-political state of the world. The motif of flowers in times of war carries deep cultural significance, symbolising both remembrance and resilience. In pop culture, flowers frequently appear as emblems of mourning, peace, or protest, as exemplified in the many album covers. The red poppy, for instance, became a universal symbol of remembrance after World War I, immortalised in poetry and worn annually to honour fallen soldiers. Those who survived would collect wildflowers from battlefields and dry them to be used as powerful embellishments. Conversely, the flower power movement of the 1960s, an inspiration of many works in the exhibition like the dual technicolour prints of Takashi Murakami, repurposed floral imagery as a pacifist symbol, rejecting violence through various disciplines.
It is possible that collaborating curators employed the unbridled qualities of nature in an attempt to pacify the shaky hands of us glassy-eyed Londoners, battered by our contemporary news-scape, especially in the face of political unrest and times of war. We descended the stairs, taking a final look at Law’s floral behemoth, a line now winding out of the room with visitors hoping to get a picture with the installation. As we stepped back onto the streets of London, the vivid colours and layered symbolism of the show lingered in my mind, much like the scent of a freshly cut bouquet—fleeting yet impossible to forget.
FLOWERS – FLORA IN CONTEMPORARY ART & CULTURE is on at the Saatchi Gallery until 5 May 2025.
Abigail Mansfield
Contributing Writer, MADE IN BED