Bloemen’ lovely! Local supplier adds a fragrant touch to the Laing Art Gallery

The Laing Art Gallery would like to extend its thanks and appreciation to wholesale flower company Bon Bloemen, who have provided hundreds of fresh flowers in-kind support towards the Gallery’s new art exhibition, The Enchanted Interior.

Two key works in the exhibition required fresh flowers as part of its display.

Sixty blooms of fresh stargazer lilies are being replenished weekly in Valeska Soares’s ‘Fainting Couch’ (Prototype), a multi-sensory artwork created by the Brazilian artist which releases the smell of the strongly-scented flowers from a concealed drawer underneath. 

Sixty red gerbera daisies were inserted at the start of the exhibition behind the windowpanes of mahogany doors in Anya Gallaccio’s work ‘can love remember the question and the answer’ (2003). Bon Bloemen were able to source an exact match of the artist’s request: gerberas with yellow centres and an average head size of 8cm, which will decay throughout the course of the exhibition. 

Madeleine Kennedy, Curator of The Enchanted Interior, says:

"These works by Valeska Soares and Anya Gallaccio are each crucially important to The Enchanted Interior exhibition, exploring themes of seduction, intoxication, enclosure, and deterioration in unique and compelling ways through their use of concealed or pressed flowers. We are extremely grateful to Bon Bloemen for enabling us to include these art works in the exhibition through the generous provision of fresh cut flowers throughout the duration of its display at the Laing Art Gallery."

Danielle Horn-Bland, Managing Director of Bon Bloemen says:

“We are hugely passionate and proud in what we do here at Bon Bloemen and believe that fresh cut flowers are an art form in their very own way. From, how they naturally grow to the variance of intoxicating aromas they produce, flowers are truly inspiring. Like all forms of art, each flower has its own beauty as well as its own mystery. Therefore, when we were approached by the Laing Art Gallery, it was an easy decision to make. It is a pleasure to be able to assist such a magnificent art exhibition at such a prestigious venue. We look forward to working with one another on further projects over the coming years. It’s going to be exciting, so watch this space.”

The Enchanted Interior (12 October 2019 – 22 February 2020), explores the sinister implications of a popular theme in nineteenth-century painting: the depiction of the interior as a ‘gilded cage’ in which women are pictured as ornamental objects. The Enchanted Interior will run until 22 February 2020 and includes key artists including Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, Evelyn De Morgan, Dorothea Tanning and William Holman Hunt. 

Bon Bloemen is the North East's leading supplier of wholesale flowers, plants and sundries to the trade, with over 200 years of combined experience in the industry. 

Right: Anya Gallaccio ‘can love remember the question and the answer’ (2003) On loan from Arts Council Collection

Centre: Edward Burne-Jones Laus Veneris (1873-73) Laing Art Gallery

Photography by Colin Davison

Valeska Soares, Fainting Couch (Prototype), 2002. On loan from Tate.

Photography by Colin Davison