Year: 2010
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 170 x 270 cm (66 7/8 x 106 1/4 in.)
Acquired from Sotheby's, 2022
Quinn has a large series of works, and one of the most famous series is “Garden” (2000). It was created for Fondazione Prada, a large showcase equipped with a refrigeration system, in which he displayed an installation like a garden of paradise using ornamental flowers of different seasons and regions. Since then, Quinn has started to create a series of works featuring the artificial beauty praised by cultivar flowers optimized for human pleasure. Since ancient times, flowers have been a familiar part of nature for celebrating the joy of life and giving as a gift to the dead, but today they continue to be consumed as a product for short-term appreciation. In this series of hyperrealism paintings of flowers, including this work, Quinn does not only praise the beauty of flowers. Instead, he depicts the unnaturalness of the cultivated flowers. They are no longer natural. Cultivars are separated from the wild, and not allowed to sow seeds as they have been reinvented into something for adding colors to human life. In this series, Quinn photographs and precisely depicts flowers scattered in environments such as volcanic sand or snow where flowers should never have naturally bloomed. It depicts the frozen time of flowers stripped of nature. The flowers, which are subjected to selective breeding and genetic manipulation, symbolize human greed in designing other lives for their benefit.
