The group exhibition Still in Bloom explores floral still life in contemporary art through different artistic perspectives and approaches. By recalling and extending, overwriting or even disrupting the characteristics of still life, the exhibiting artists – Péter Mátyási, Sándor Körei, Eszter Lázár and Gideon Horváth – reflect on the genre’s traditional formal and conceptual framework, its topicality and its inherent vital expressiveness from a contemporary perspective.
From the 16th century onwards, the plants depicted in still life paintings were not limited to the imitation of nature or to mere decorativeness. Their symbolism encompasses fertility and mortality, purity and sexuality, love, desire, and loss. Behind their ordinariness, their beauty and their stillness, there is always the idea of an inevitable withering and passing. Like the genre itself, its permeating symbolic meanings and narratives are constantly changing, reacting to particular artistic, historical and social contexts.
The works in the exhibition represent the sensuality, the decorativeness, the insignificance, the ephemerality of plants, the vividness of their flowering, and the elegy of their decay, whether it is the precise arrangement of cut flowers, the rawness of nature or even desire and sexuality through organic forms. Formal and medial constraints are gradually disrupted in the exhibition space. Floral still life, as well as the representations and meanings associated with the genre are embraced from a contemporary perspective.