Immortal Blooms - Coming 22.09.26

Flowers do not ask permission to bloom. They do not negotiate with darkness or bargain with time. They don't arrange themselves for an audience. They arrive in the dark, in the desert, at the bottom of a river. They are beautiful, whether anyone sees them or not.

Immortal Blooms is Arno Carstens' most primal body of work. Twenty-one oil paintings that look directly at flowers and find in them that beauty is not fragile. That it erupts from burning rivers and gravesides and molten earth. That it presides over strange courts and ancient rituals. That it survives.

These are not decorative flowers. They are not gentle. They carry the weight of mythology, of grief, of transformation, of the cosmos itself. A calla lily stands sovereign above everything that has fallen. A swan rises from a river on fire. A ghost lingers between two crosses while white blooms insist on living. A creature of feather and flame holds court over hundreds of purple roses. Gold transforms in the dark. Everything blooms at once and the sound is deafening.

Carstens brings to flowers the same unflinching attention he brings to the human figure, treating them as fully themselves, as subjects of extraordinary psychological and spiritual complexity. The result is a collection of flowers at every threshold. At birth and death, joy and grief, beginning and ending. We reach for them when words are not enough and when we place them in someone's hands we are saying: I see you. I feel you. I am with you.