Wallflowers, a Frye Art Museum exhibition on display from February 7th through May 17th, highlights eleven contemporary artists who exemplify the beauty behind floral imagery. Frye Executive Director and Exhibition Curator Jamilee Lacy arranges the pieces to transport the viewer from the art gallery to a vibrant garden. Capturing more than just an alluring image, the compositions carry symbols of memory and culture. With roots in the floral still life genre, this collection exhibits a deep form of storytelling through life experience, floral beauty, and allusions to the ephemerality of both.

The eleven floral still lifes hung in Wallflowers present a dialogue of life and death. By depicting thriving growth and deceased flowers, the artists foreground the circle of life. They inspire the question, Can we find beauty and harmony within the presence of every flower, alive or dead? 

Three artists in particular embody this idea: Elizabeth Corkery, Azadeh Gholizadeh, and Patricia Iglesias Peco. Sydney-based artist Corkery, trained as a printmaker, centers on ideas of repetition, architectural space, as well as social and political themes and ethnography. Gholizadeh, born in Tehran, concentrates on body, memory, and landscape, all through nostalgia and connection to her homeland. Patricia Iglesias Peco’s mastery lies in her grasp of color theory and full-detailed depictions of the natural world. Working in oils, her compositions fluctuate between the harmonious and bizarre.

Certain artists create strong texture with intentional brushstrokes, sparking nostalgia and emotion. Others showcase the beauty of floral patterns from various cultures, such as Islamic patterns. While another set of paintings serves as analogies of life, bodies, or objects, all up to the viewer’s interpretation. These deliberate yet fluid concepts keep the gallery cohesive and elaborative. 

Wallflowers is a tribute to still life, one that is historically and ideologically critical to art history. Wallflowers explores the meaning hidden in flower petals and thorn-filled stems. The artists’ personal muses are a love letter to art and a social critique, inviting the audience to recall their own gardens and reflect on the cycle of life.