this exploration of flora in history and contemporary culture smells as good as it looks

On entering the Saatchi Gallery’s latest exhibition, which is simply titled Flowers, you might think that you have just walked into a supersized florist’s shop, surrounded by bunches and bunches of blooms.

The aroma of dried flowers comes from Rebecca Louise Law’s monumental arrangement La Fleur Morte (2025), which was created through workshops with people from the local community. As in a flower shop, the viewer is overwhelmed by a heady mix of colour, shape and smell.

Flowers offers an overview of flora not only in contemporary art but in their wider cultural significance. Rooms are loosely organised by theme and medium, with an occasional nod to more serious subjects, such as eroticism, death, danger or decay.

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The first room, Roots, offers historical context for the show, from Van Gogh to William Morris’s floral designs. Dutch 17th-century paintings are recreated for the digital age in Bob and Nick Carter’s video work Transforming Flowers in a Vase (2016).

The irreality of their digitally revived bunch of flowers, presented in a heavy wooden frame, reminds us that those masterly paintings were themselves a construct.

Painters have often arranged flowers that bloomed at different times of the year together in one image. As Bart Cornelis, curator at London’s National Gallery, explained when discussing Dutch flower paintings in 2017, these arrangements are “not realism [but] “a construct … In a sense, that’s what makes it art”.

In the next space, In Bloom, Jim Dine’s black-and-white lithograph Sunflowers (2011) stands out amid the profusion of bright yellows, reds, greens and pinks. With the colour stripped away, the eye is drawn to the flowers’ structure and their dark-seeded heart.

Speaking about the connection between plants and people, artist and subject, Dine has said that “if my personality is revealed in a plant drawing … it would be just the emotion and the way I felt when I depicted it at that moment, that day – or as the days go on, the building up of layers like the unconscious”. This work feels deeply connected to those early Dutch paintings and their small, often-missed memento mori.

In the same room, a whole wall is dedicated to an image of Jeff Koons’ two-storey sculpture Puppy (1992), a dog covered in bedding plants.

Koons’ notorious overt commercialism leads the viewer back to the sense of being in a shop – this time offering high-end floral fashion and jewellery. In one corner, glass display cases hold jewelled brooches by “curatorial partners” Buccellati. Next to them are Marimekko prints in an oversized poster display rack.

Beauty and danger

Stepping into the next room, the viewer moves from shopping arcade back into a gallery to look at flowers in photography and sculpture. Here are more decadent arrays, where visitors are drawn like pollinators to William Darrell’s trippy kinetic sculpture The Machinery of Enchantment (2025).

By the nature of its subject, this show is full of colour and form. It is a reminder that, as art writer Patrick J. Reed explained in relation to photographer and painter Edward Steichen’s 1936 exhibition of freshly cut bouquets of Delphiniums:

The significance of flowers, then as now, is linked to traditions, tastes and class distinctions. To appreciate fine vegetation means to understand, if not possess, ‘well-bred’ decorum; to understand when and how to navigate manicured botanical refreshment.

With Flowers, the Saatchi Gallery offers visitors this opportunity in abundance.

Upstairs, the exhibition is more conceptually curated. The true symbolic power and pervasiveness of flower imagery comes to the fore in a room full of film posters, album sleeves and book covers.

Among them are the disturbingly beautiful posters for Jonathan Glazer’s film Zone of Interest by Neil Kellerhouse. Images from the film spring to mind: the garden next to the concentration camp; the profusion of flowers fertilised by ashes from the ovens. Monstrous actions are shielded by nature.

Read more:
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The relationship between beauty and danger becomes more overt in one of the final rooms, Science: Life or Death. Suddenly, we are amid less decorative fare. Here, under glass domes, are Emma Witter’s exquisitely intricate sculptures of flowers – chillingly, all made of tiny bones.

These sculptures sit in stark visual juxtaposition to Banita Mistry’s minimal line paintings, which recall modernism yet are hand-drawn with Henna. These contrasting approaches to similar themes sit opposite historically laden botanical illustrations. Darker themes re-emerge and open up thoughts of the importance of contemporary artists engaging in debates around decolonisation.

So, among the seductive splendour of form and colour lurks the reality of depictions of flowers in the contemporary art world. A construct balanced between the need to reflect on human frailty through the relationship with delicate mutable blooms and the harsh edge of producing seductive profitable goods.

Flowers – Flora in Contemporary Art and Culture is on display at London’s Saatchi Gallery until May 5 2025.