The Pola Museum of Art is collaborating with flower artist Azuma Makoto for exhibition of his botanical sculptures inspired by flowers in paintings in the Museum collection. Azuma has brilliantly and faithfully reproduced with real flowers, in detail down to the exact angles of the petals and stems, the flower motifs of three masterpiece paintings. He also produced videos over several weeks to document the life of the flowers, recording how they wither with time.

Artist Comment

Producing works for the Time and Transformation exhibition
I have been engaged since 2015 in a project themed on ‘flowers and master paintings.’ I use real flowers to replicate those in paintings by great artists of the past. The process has allowed me to experience what artists such as Van Gogh, Picasso, Redon, and Renoir might have felt and thought as they painted ephemeral flowers transforming day by day before their eyes.

On the occasion of the Pola Museum of Art Time and Transformation exhibition, I have been given the opportunity to reinterpret three masterpiece paintings from the Museum collection in contemporary style.
Though I have been until now ‘reproducing’ flowers through photographs, I am this time using real flowers to create a breathing image reflective of the movement of time. The flowers move and quiver freely, beautifully blooming or quietly withering. Water eventually becomes murky, flower petals drop, and leaves fade. Flowers are not simply objects. Exactly like us, their lives narrate a story of time.
I came to view the masterpiece paintings anew, as an experience of ‘time.’ Without doubt, the masterpiece artists observed the flower transformations in light of the passage of time. We can understand that rather than being of a single moment, the flowers they painted represent nothing less than the life of flowers lodged in their memory.
Azuma Makoto