London’s Saatchi Gallery Focuses on Flowers in This Exhibition

What do the Cure, Andy Warhol and Beatrix Potter have in common?

At an ongoing exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London, the answer unites artists, fashion designers, musicians and photographers across the centuries: the use of flowers in their work.

“Flowers — Flora in Contemporary Art & Culture,” which runs until May 5 and then will reopen on May 30 through the summer, explores how artists throughout history have used nature as inspiration, motif and even physical material, leading up to modern art and popular culture.

“The entire project is a love letter to nature,” Paul Foster, the director of the Saatchi Gallery, said in an email, noting that it’s one of the most popular major shows since the gallery became a nonprofit in 2019.

Foster explained that the concept for the exhibition arose after several smaller projects related to flowers received extremely positive responses. “All of these revealed the huge appetite of audiences to engage with flora in art,” he said. “With ‘Flowers,’ we wanted to explore this more deeply and celebrate the subject at scale.”

The exhibition features works by famous names like Warhol — a selection from his “Flowers” series, first shown in Paris and New York in 1964, is on display — as well as contemporary artists like the Canadian painter Andrew Salgado.

Visitors can roam nine rooms over two floors of the gallery, located in the Chelsea area, where over 500 works are being showcased.

In some of the exhibition’s rooms, floral-themed art is used for practical purposes, like in textiles by the 19th-century English designer William Morris, or in fashion by Vivienne Westwood and Mary Quant, who is considered the mother of the miniskirt, and whose floral-patterned designs are part of the display.

“Styles may change, colours come and go, hemlines rise and fall, but flowers almost ceaselessly appear on what we wear,” a placard in the gallery says.

In “La Fleur Morte,” one of two large-scale immersive installations in the exhibition, the British artist Rebecca Louise Law created a room filled with over 100,000 dried flowers that are draped in long, narrow bunches that hang from the ceiling, like intricate floral chandeliers. Visitors can walk among the colorful and fragrant hangings.

In a video interview, Law said these flowers came from her own archive that she began collecting from gardens or waste from the flower industry beginning in 2003, and has reused in different works. “The message is, how can we value nature and acknowledge the exchange that we have with nature,” she said.

Law added that preserving and reusing the flowers as material “forces the viewer to be in a space where they will have a chance to have a look at what that material is, and its value.”

The second installation, “Extra-Natural” by the French digital artist Miguel Chevalier, is a vividly colored interactive garden that uses algorithms and infrared cameras to respond to the movements of visitors in real time as they walk through the room.

“This garden becomes a sensitive, interactive ecosystem in which the visitor is no longer a passive observer, but a true participant in the artwork,” Chevalier said in an email.

The installation is “a reinvented nature between dream and reality, evocative of ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ ” Foster said.

In another section, the exhibition explores how flowers have been used in pop culture like books, film posters and album covers — the Beatles’s “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and the Cure’s “Disintegration” are part of a display of 120 record covers that use flower imagery.

Rosie Grant, the exhibition programming executive, said that the curators wanted to “include the rich creativity evident” in these art forms that were “too often unfairly written off as low or mainstream culture.”

Other rooms feature fine art, sculpture and photography that depict flowers across different mediums: a still-life photograph of a flower in a vase by Pedro Almodóvar; a pencil and watercolor study by Beatrix Potter; a 70-minute time-lapse film of a slowly-decaying bouquet of flowers by Rob and Nick Carter.

Some artists’ descriptions of their inspirations are displayed alongside their work, like Yayoi Kusama and her screen-print “Summer Flowers.” Kusama recounts a flower-themed childhood hallucination that inspired her later art: “I found myself trembling — with fear, amid flowers incarnate, which had appeared all of a sudden.”

For Law, the installation artist, the hope is that some of this inspiration and emotion can be transferred to people in London visiting the exhibition, and “La Fleur Morte.”

“It’s like giving yourself the time and the space to be grateful for what the earth provides us,” she said, adding: “I would hope that people have the moment to just be.”