Flowers

Press Release
Muratcentoventidue Artecontemporanea
FLOWERS
Lello Gelao / Francesca Loprieno/ Lauren Moffatt/ Ursula Palla/
Chiara Passa/ Sabrina Ratté/ Raeda Saadeh
Flowers have attracted the interest of artists of all times and cultures with different meanings and roles, sometimes they are just decorative elements, other times they represent a true universe of symbols.
Even in recent decades, artists have continued to look at flowers: from the inspiration of pop art Georgia O'Keeffe, through Andy Warhol or David Hockney, to Jeff Koons the flower has lost none of its charm among contemporary artists today.
At a time when climate change is leading us to rethink our relationship with nature and the living world, we can wonder what can we learn from flowers, from their resilience, from their constant adaptation to their environment, from their sobriety. Vulnerable and essential, they are an indispensable driving force of life.
Our fascination for them is growing – far beyond mere aesthetic pleasure. Symbols of fragility and rebirth, they are becoming a particularly powerful indicator for lighting up current issues.
Working across a range of media, each of the artists in the exhibition has harnessed the visual and conceptual power of flowers in new and unexpected ways through paintings, sculptures, photographs, video installations and interactive works.
Lello Gelao is an Italian artist who lives and works in Bari. His research, which has always been carried out in the field of pictorial language, has for some years focused on the themes of landscape and portraiture, drawing on an imagery that is that of the mass media and photography. Gelao's skill consists in representing the complexity of the human figure with simple lines and flat colors. In fact, his faces and busts are striking for their immediacy and emotional depth, despite the linearity of the forms. Thus each portrait seems to capture an intimate truth, capable of involving the public on multiple levels. The work "Fiori" is characterized by bold and bright colors and simplified shapes. Continuing to use large flat fields of color, the artist turns his attention to the flora in the same way he focuses on his human subjects. He focuses on the morphology of the flowers, flattening the complexity of the plant in favor of capturing its charm and personality. The finished work expresses harmony and balance. The artist also focuses on the creation of sculptures, such as “Five Flowers” on display here, which, despite being made of aluminum sheets and iron wires, appear light and airy, transforming a static art form into a dynamic play of movement, volume and color.
Francesca Loprieno is an Italian artist who lives and works in Paris. She experiments with different languages, favoring photography, video and installation, and she makes crossing and travel, substantiated by her personal and collective memory, her current field of research. Her work is a personal attempt to establish a dialogue between the perception of the landscape and her intimate crossing of it with the intention of collecting sensitive and imperceptible traces, fragments of an intimate diary in which identity and otherness interpenetrate to generate a broader and more collective story.
The artist proposes an installation entitled Harnes: in the flower printed on textile, she evokes an archetypal and at the same time intimate image, the result of a project in several phases that unfold between 2017 and 2025. The work is part of a broader investigation of the landscape and natural elements, used as keys to access the maternal place of origin: a region in the north of France deeply marked by the Italian migration of the 1950s.
This fragile botanical element, isolated and magnified, becomes the emblem of a primordial femininity, but also of an existential fragility that borders on the universal. The flower, in its silent unfolding, is not only living matter: it becomes a sign, symbol, metaphor of Mother Earth, of genealogical memory and of creative power. In this gesture of enlargement and contemplation, the artist not only celebrates origins, but questions the very meaning of identity, revealing how nature can become a mirror of the soul and guardian of roots.
Lauren Moffatt is an Australian artist based between Valencia and Berlin. She works with experimental practices using different media such as painting, performance and immersive technologies. Her works, often presented in multiple forms, explore the paradoxical subjectivity of connected bodies and the friction at the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds. They usually take the form of settings and characters from speculative fiction (a macro-genre that includes fantasy, science fiction, horror and their subgenres), and and environments conceived using a mix of obsolete and pioneering technologies, often occupying both physical and virtual space.
The artist presents a diptych consisting of Compost XXII and Compost XXII bis , two videos that are part of Flowers for Suzanne Clair (named after a secondary character in J. G. Ballard's catastrophe novel The Crystal World), a body of work on the relationship between the human and the non-human, rooted in contemporary issues anticipated in the books of J.G. Ballard and other authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin.
In these works, she creates a strange kind of organic digitality that revolves around a process of collecting and digitizing plant specimens through an exchange between the physical and the virtual. By fusing photographic details of flowers with random textures, these fictional plant species are windows onto the otherness glimpsed through a prism of biological life.
Ursula Palla was born Switzerland, today she lives and works in Zürich. In her work she interlinks video and room sculptures and works with sensitive materials such as moulded sugar, coal dust or snow. The fragility of nature and wild life is the focus in many works. On a first level an enchanting aesthetic make these accessible. Yet all works are based on comprehensive research, and only its knowledge completely reveals the depth and urgency of the work. The video and room installations by Ursula Palla are poetic and at the same time show up voids that often leave behind a stale feeling and remind us of our responsibility towards nature and environment. This makes the artist’s work highly topical.
Flowers 4, was filmed in Holland at the flower market in Aalsmeer. The video sequences give an insight into the daily work of the dyers, who dip mainly white flowers, especially carnations, asters, roses and gypsophila, into colorful baths. The dyeing and packaging of the flowers is captured in an environment in which the natural scent of the flowers gradually gives way to the smell of synthetic colors. The slight brutality of this process, reminiscent of the aesthetics of a slaughterhouse, contrasts sharply with the naturalness and beauty of the flowers. The flower market becomes the setting for an absurd staging that illustrates how man tries to shape nature according to his own ideas. The video installation reflects man's general treatment of nature. Flowers, the epitome of natural beauty, become the metapher of artificiality - and precious objects become ordinary and turn into hazardous waste.

The Italian artist Chiara Passa currently lives and works in Rome. She has been working in the field of media art since 1997. Among the pioneers in Italy in the use of digital as a tool for artistic creation, Chiara designs her works using multiple media: animation, interactive video installations and virtual reality, exploring the boundary between real and imaginary, using essential geometric shapes that result in a dynamic and three-dimensional vision of space. The installations involve the viewer first-hand, pushing him/her to confront another spatiality, a digital elsewhere. An idea of performance is at the basis of her works, where the place is autonomous and moves beyond its functionality.
Object Oriented Bulb n 3 is a virtual and interactive sculpture that reinterprets stone forms and flower bulbs through digital metamorphosis. This work conceptually transforms ancient materials into fluid and generative sculptures, revealing hidden dimensions through audience interaction. Viewers manipulate 3D forms with clicks and touches, altering the materiality through algorithms that deform and fragment the structure. The interactive work explores the contrast between sculptural permanence and digital fluidity, creating a participatory space where matter and code converge. Object Oriented Bulb n 3 invites to dissolve the boundaries between the physical and the computational.
By utilising a mixture of photography, 3D animation and analog technologies, Canada-born, Paris-based artist Sabrina Ratté investigates the interplay between surroundings and subjectivity. Her practice includes video, animation, installations, sculptures, audio-visual performances and prints, all of which function in service of a multidisciplinary exploration of space, both digital and physical.
Sabrina Ratté presents in this exhibition Floralia II , the second video of the Floralia series, currently exhibited in Milan at the Meet Digital Culture Center with the artist's latest works.
For this video series, Ratté draws inspiration from the writing of Donna J. Haraway, the author of A Cyborg Manifesto, as well as science-fiction writers Ursula K. Le Guin and Greg Egan, as she imagines a speculative future in which samples of extinct plant species are preserved and displayed in a virtual archive room.
Across the four works Ratté simulates four ecosystems, visualising a fusion of organic matter and technology whereby, as Ratté explains, past life and new technology “coexist in a perpetual tension of the present.”
Each video depicts the various ecosystems as they experience moments of interference, caused by memories escaping from the plant samples as ancient energy is released from their organic forms, “revealing traces of a past that continues to haunt the place.” The video works are accompanied with sound design and field recordings from Canadian artist Andrea-Jane Cornell, as well as soundtrack composition from Ratté herself.
Raeda Saadeh was born in Umm al-Fahm and studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, where she lives today. She is an internationally renowned photographer, her works are exhibited all over the world. Her means of expression are, in addition to photography, installation, video and performances.
Saadeh’s work uses the body as a tool to explore identity, gender and space as well as the relationship between place and the self. Her performances, videos and photo works are preoccupied with borders as a cultural, topographical and physical phenomenon.
The artist presents the video performance "Love..., no love" proposed for the seventh edition of Arctic Action in Svalbard, in which she leafs through thirty red roses in the wild nature outside Longyearbyen.
She creates work motivated by her being a Palestinian woman; for her, art can be an emancipatory response to a society often defined by patriarchal, traditional and religious conflict. The woman, as a recurring subject in her installations and performances, is represented as if she lives in a state of occupation. This occupation or "occupying" force is the result of the political conditions of her environment and this affects the otherwise peaceful quality of her world. There are both private and public elements that manipulate this world. Her personal freedom is also limited but she seeks justice and longs for change. She is not blind to the opponents around her and pushes forward with enduring strength – and at times, she feels that it is almost as if she has to assume a sort of madness in her behavior so that she can live unharmed by oppression, in an attempt to always protect those she loves from negative forces of fear.

Venue
Muratcentoventidue-Artecontemporanea
Via G. Murat 122 / b - Bari
Inauguration
Saturday May 24, 2025, 7.30 pm
Period
May 24 - June 30 , 2025
Opening hours
Monday, Tuesday and Saturday by appointment
Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 6 pm to 8 pm
Info
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