Wild Flowers (wildness is contextual!)

About

Wild Flowers

(wildness is contextual!)

narrative projects is pleased to present a group exhibition Wild Flowers (wildness is contextual!) curated by Carlos Noronha Feio. The exhibition brings together seventeen international artists from different generations who work in a number of different mediums. Each work chosen by Noronha Feio for the show examines the motif of the flower.

This exhibition has its origins in Noronha Feio's interest in fauna as a representation of power. A line from a letter Claude Monet had written to a friend saying, ‘I would love to paint those gorgeous daisies’, triggered this curiosity. The artist was not referring to anything other than the flowers he tended for in his garden. His comment, full of desire and longing, 'I would love to...' (but I am not) mark a period of such intensity in Monet's productivity that he was simply too busy to be able to paint all that he wished, including the simple beauty of his daisies.

On the surface of the show, the naïve and sentimental aesthetic value of the flower presents itself as a deceptive cover over the deeper conceptual research that the works truly explore. For example, Richard Hamilton’s Flower Piece B, 1975; shows a major pictorial genre and its flowery allure is an irrelevant anachronism in the context of cultural ideas in our time. Marte Eknæs’ video Rainbow Rose, 2012, shows an alternative use for the 3D modelling software that is primarily used to design military technologies. Mustafa Hulusi’s painting from the Afyon series reference Byzantine mosaic with its lavish use of gold and black contrast, but at the same time hints to intoxication as a current social condition in Turkey and the region of the Near East. Neil Haas’ blind sculpture painted with flowers in a wider context of the artist’s work offers a counter-balance to his studies of young male streetwise masculinity.

The artist-curator is seeking to explore how the artists approach the natural beauty of flowers and how the aesthetic quality of the flower motif transforms within the contextual framework of each individual practice. This relationship between formal

aesthetics and context creates a duality of possible conceptual readings of the works in the exhibition. Each flower becomes a representation of the artists’ interests, research and experiment. Collectively they touch on subjects as varied as beauty, sexuality and technical ability through to issues of consumerism, politics, war and pop culture.

Using flower as case in study Noronha Feio investigates context dependency of an image in situation when information becomes increasingly more and more image heavy.

About the Artists

Mahmoud Bakhshi (b. 1977, lives and works Tehran); Juliette Blightman (b. 1980 in the UK, lives and works in Berlin); Lynn Chadwick (born, lived and worked 1914 – 2003 in England, UK); Ilya Dolgov (b. 1984 in Voronezh, Russia, lives and works in Kronshtadt, Russia); Harm van den Dorpel (b. 1981 in Zaandam, The Netherlands, lives and works in Berlin); Marte Eknæs (b. 1978 in Norway, lives and works in Norway); Marita Fraser (b. 1969 in Austria, lives and works in London, UK and Vienna, Austria); Neil Haas (b. 1971 in South Shields, UK, lives and works London); Richard Hamilton (born, lived and worked 1922 – 2011 in London, UK); Mustafa Hulusi (b. 1971 in London, UK, lives and works in London); Xiao-yang Li (b. 1985 in Harbin, China, lives and works in London, UK); Georgy Litichevsky (b. 1956 in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine, lives and works in Russia); Gabriela Machado (b. 1960 in Joinville, Brazil, lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil); Lulou Margarine (b. 1984 in Dallas, Texas, lives and works in New York, USA); Carlos Noronha Feio (b. 1981 in Lisbon, Portugal, lives and works in London, UK); Alice Ronchi (b. 1989 in Piacenza, Italy, lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands); Daniel van Straalen (b. 1987 in the Netherlands, lives and works in The Hague, Netherlands); Sigrid Viir (b. 1979, lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia).

Noronha Feio is an artist-researcher trying with this exhibition to exercise his mind of habits acquired during the development of his PhD.