Flowers in Full Bloom: Saatchi Gallery’s Celebration of Flora in Art and Culture
Flowers: Flora In Contemporary Art & Culture at the Saatchi Gallery from 12 February until 5 May 2025. Standard entry costs £20 with a donation. For more information and bookings, click here to visit the Saatchi website.
Flowers have long fascinated artists, writers, and lovers, acting as both symbol and spectacle. FLOWERS – FLORA IN CONTEMPORARY ART & CULTURE, the latest exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, celebrates this enduring fascination by gathering over 500 works spanning painting, photography, fashion, and installation. The result is a wide-ranging, if at times uneven, meditation on flowers as object and metaphor.
The strongest moments come when the exhibition allows flowers to do what they do best—evoke a visceral response. Rebecca Louise Law’s installation of 100,000 dried flowers hangs in a suspended stillness, their brittle perfume filling the air. Time is palpable here: flowers that once bloomed are now preserved in mid-air, their weightlessness countered by their slow decay. The piece is both elegy and tribute, a reminder that even in stillness, something is always shifting.
Rebecca Louise Law’s Flower Installation
Miguel Chevalier’s Extra-Natural takes a different approach, turning floral imagery into a digital environment where projected blossoms bloom and collapse in reaction to movement. Unlike Law’s installation, which confronts the inevitability of time, Chevalier’s work plays with impermanence in real-time, allowing viewers to alter its landscape as they move through it. These two pieces, in dialogue with each other, suggest a tension between what flowers represent—beauty, ephemerality, transformation.
Miguel Chevalier’s Extra-Natural
Some sections of the exhibition are more curatorial than conceptual. The rooms dedicated to Flowers in Music, Film, and Literature, for instance, present a scattered collection of artifacts—record sleeves, book jackets, film posters—that feel more like a mood board than an exploration of meaning.
A Galliano-designed Manolo Blahnik heel and Schiaparelli’s haute couture wedding dress embroidered with sculptural hydrangeas showcase the undeniable allure of floral motifs in fashion. These pieces highlight the ways flowers have been woven into clothing as symbols of elegance, transformation, and natural beauty.
Marimekko’s bold, modernist blooms were a highlight, as were the intricate botanical motifs of historical couture. It reminded me of an exhibition at the V&A on menswear, where a striking hot pink outfit demonstrated how fashion evolves with the discovery of new dyes. That year, hot pink became the pinnacle of haute fashion, a testament to how color can dictate style. I would have loved to see a similar thought process in certain rooms here, exploring how florals in fashion have been shaped by technological and artistic innovations over time.
Manolo Blahnik for John Galliano
Flowers, after all, have always been about duality. They are symbols of beauty and decay, of love and loss, of fragility and endurance. They are the bouquet at a wedding and the wreath at a funeral. The pressed bloom in a book, the wildflower pushing through concrete. FLOWERS at the Saatchi Gallery attempts to capture this complexity, even if not every room succeeds.
Some moments bloom brilliantly, others feel like petals scattered without a clear arrangement. But perhaps that is the nature of flowers—and of art. Some meanings take root immediately, others unfurl over time. The question is not whether the exhibition succeeds or falters, but what lingers after you leave.
