In full bloom: 'Flowers: Flora in art and culture' opens at the Saatchi Gallery

Hanging from the ceiling and filling an entire double-height gallery are more than 100,000 dried flowers. A soft aroma of rose petal potpourri envelops you as you walk beneath the cascades of seed heads and grasses, lavender, roses and hydrangeas.

White statice is threaded on copper wires and gives the installation a nebulous air, as if you are stepping into a floral cloud. La Fleur Morte (2025) is the fragile creation of Welsh artist Rebecca Louise Law and the first work you see in the Saatchi Gallery’s vast new exhibition Flowers: Flora in art and culture. In size, ambition and photo-friendliness La Fleur Morte sets the tone for the entire show.

Flowers unfurl over two floors, blooming in corridors and stairwells as well as across nine galleries. The range of work is staggering: everything from flowers made of bones and medieval herbariums to album covers, book illustrations, corsets and tattoos.

There’s Wordsworth’s poem Daffodils, a giant photograph of Jeff Koons’ plant-covered Puppy and images of Vietnam War protesters slotting flowers down gun barrels.

The exhibition begins by exploring the roots of floral art and showcasing work from the last sixty years. This is not an exhibition about the history of still life, despite opening with the Dutch golden age and Gordon Cheung’s contemporary interpretation of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in his City of Gardens (Suzhou) (2023).

Rather it offers a brief history of artists working with flowers — Alphonse Mucha, William Morris, Winifred Nicholson — before moving towards the colourful paintings, prints and embroideries of Gillian Ayres, Marc Quinn, Yinka Illori, Takashi Murakami, Martin Maloney and many others.

Flowers doesn’t restrict itself to art: one gallery features flowers in fashion, and highlights include Vivienne Westwood’s platform shoes, Mary Quant’s flower power suits and jewellery such as a rock crystal and diamond orchid brooch from the roaring twenties designed by Mario Buccellati.

Further galleries explore the medical properties of plants and how album covers employ flowers (think The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising). It’s a heady mix. There’s even a gallery where you can interact with Miguel Chevalier’s digital garden. He uses infrared sensors to ensure his artificial blooms bend and sway according to your position in the room.

Elsewhere, there are six Buccellati archival pieces on display — one for each generation of Buccellati designer — along with an installation of the jewellery brand's silverware.

As gallery director Paul Foster explains, ‘The Gallery is delighted to pay homage to nature and celebrate the manifold ways that artists have been inspired by nature.’

‘Flowers: Flora in art and culture’, supported by Cazenove Capital and Buccelati, is on at the Saatchi Gallery, London, until 5th May.