Impossible bouquets

Floral Atlas, which opened on 25 January 2018, features a series of impossible bouquet paintings, in which the artist takes on the still life genre of the flower arrangement to explore intersections between nature and culture.

The still life genre has taken on many different meanings and functions since its emergence in the 16^th century, and remains to this day an important playground for artistic experimentation and innovation. Marchesi uses the genre for a theatrical critique of the absurdity of viewing constructs of culture as natural, and thus speaks to contemporary socio-political conditions.

Karla Marchesi’s paintings feature exclusively objects. Yet, human existence is present, as a metaphor of someone who’s been there, who has taken part, who is an observer, or a perpetrator of a place or a scene. The artist investigates the meaning of places as they are constructed in our minds. Places which Michel Foucault has described as heterotopies (as opposed to utopia, non-places), places which function as a screen; made of our desires and fears, and on which memories are projected and mutually understood.

Flower / © Artscape

“We envisage and represent the landscape the way we want to the see the world reflected back at us. The works which feature here offer a vision of selective remembrances associated with the tourist or traveller; whose place-making experience is flanked by a sense of solitude, otherness and disassociation in space.” K. Marchesi.

With its explosion of colours and its sophisticated interplay of light and shadows, Marchesi’s Floral Art series provides a unique experience, which immerses the viewer in a twilight zone, where dream and reality converge. Not to be missed!

The exhibition will remain open until 10 March 2018 at LAGURA, 18, Ave. de la Faïencerie, 1510 Luxembourg. Opening hours: Monday-Friday 12-2pm, Tuesday-Saturday 7-10pm and by appointment.

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Karla Marchesi, born 1984 in Brisbane, studied fine arts and painting in Australia and the United States and developed an interest in object portraiture. In 2012 she undertook a studio residency in Berlin and has since been working there. She also participated in group shows in America, Australia, Asia and Europe and had solo exhibitions in Brisbane, Melbourne and Singapore. Her works are in public and private collections in Australia, Germany and Luxembourg. ARTSCAPE’s exhibition Floral Atlas is her first solo show in Europe since 2013.