Museum der Moderne Salzburg opens Flowers & Mushrooms an exhibition on view 27.7.2013 – 27.10.2013.
The comprehensive exhibition Flowers & Mushrooms presents current positions of contemporary representations of flowers and mushrooms and their newly developing levels of meaning.
For some time now, there has been a renaissance of flowers and mushroom themes in fine art. The works of leading “portraitists” of flowers and mushrooms, such as Peter Fischli/David Weiss, David LaChapelle, Marc Quinn, Sylvie Fleury, Nobuyoshi Araki or Carsten Höller, continue the multi-faceted and long pictorial tradition of flowers, which is unparalleled in the history of art. At the same time no other motif is so easily suspected of trivialism. The question arises of how a subject that is frequently accused of being trivial and shallow has been able to gain ground in a field of art that is generally regarded as serious and sophisticated. The picture of a flower is too easily associated with the idea of harmless beauty and the mushroom with cliché-like hallucinogenic states of conscousness. Nevertheless many artists increasingly adopt these motifs, adapt them and find individual ways to put them into the context of sociocritical, feminist, political and media-reflexive art. www.museumdermoderne.at