Flowers or nothing!
Flowers...flowered dresses, flowered tapestries, flowered sofas, chocolate boxes, paintings...and in spring, even cherry trees are in bloom.
At the exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, The Myth of the Flower from Van Gogh to Jeff Koons, we wondered what our everyday life would be like without flowers to embellish it, as flowers are "unparalleled in their beauty" and "a favourite motif of painters".
We also wondered what would happen when "this motif, which we might consider too charming, comes up against the radicalism of modern art.
While we are going through a period of ambient gloom (let's avoid the word crisis), and we are impatiently awaiting the return of spring, we leave "the flower with the gun" with the Irreverence which fortunately our contemporary artists do not deprive themselves of.
Is it a question of disrespect, revolt, curiosity, doubt, freedom, laughter, irony, that is to say, exploring all the expressions that show a "spirit of distance" in the face of this "pretty" motif that is the flower? It's a start.
Offering flowers is not an insignificant act. Indeed, there is a language of flowers, but what are the questions behind the "floral diversions" revealed by these artists?

The works of Karine Bonneval, Éric Pougeau, Florence Reymond, Samuel Rousseau, Michaële Andréa Schatt, Franck Scurti, Ole Ukena and Brigitte Zieger never cease to question our relationship with the world.

Genetic manipulations, gun-related abuses, ideological confrontation, media violence, excesses of the consumer society... are examined in turn throughout this exhibition.
It remains to be said: flowers... Don't throw any more!

I Sow to the Wind , proposal by David Rosenberg for spring 2013 in a dozen of galleries