When I entered Pace Gallery the other day to see the Julian Schnabel exhibition, I was immediately struck by this artistic floral arrangement at the front desk. Those aren’t your typical sunflowers, and what are the spiky balls? I wasn’t sure at first glance, but wanted to try to find out.
I’m not 100% sure that my research has revealed the exact answers, so if I’m wrong, please correct me in the comments section below. But from what I can gather, it seems that these sunflowers are SunFill sunflowers? Although as I’m looking at the SunFills in that link more-closely, the leaves on Pace’s sunflowers look different. As I’m looking at sunflower variations, I’m not seeing anything that is a direct match.
I think I’m right on the spiky balls, though – they seem to be wild cucumber, or manroot (Marah fabaceus). The combination of these two, the sunflowers and the manroots, certainly makes for a dramatic arrangement. And check out the pictures below … this is the same arrangement photographed from two more different angles from the one above, and it’s like the lighting can make the color of the plants look so different – there’s no filters involved here, and see how different the color is, depending on where I’m standing and how the light hits it?
Being smitten with these flowers reminded me of another dramatic floral arrangement that I saw and photographed at the front desk of the Print Center New York last May as I was visiting the Nicole Eisenman exhibition. I’m not going to try to research all of these, but I’d say the mix of roses (?), purple orchids, and other flowers and leaves makes for an extremely dramatic arrangement. I hate to say it, but I was more interested in these flowers than the Eisenman prints.
It’s so gorgeous, let’s get one more look at it.
Just for fun, let’s throw one more set of flowers into this blog post – here’s some flowers that are unlike all the rest. These are large scale sculptures by Yayoi Kusma, from her exhibition titled “I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers” at the David Zwirner Gallery this past June. From what I can find, they are made of fiberglass-reinforced plastic and painted in high impact-hued urethane to create the shiny surface.
I’ll include another photo here so that you can see the scale of these flower sculptures in relation to a human being.
