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‘WILD FLOWERS’ TO OPEN SEPT 19 AT NEW YORK’S BUCK HOUSE

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NEW YORK CITY — “Wild Flowers,” an exhibition that explores the visual power of the flower in paintings, furniture and decorative art, will open Wednesday, September 19, and continues through December 1 at The Gallery at Buck House. All of the artwork and furnishings will reflect Deborah Buck’s musings about flowers…on the wild side.

“I love nothing more than taking something and turning it on its head,” said Buck, whose previous sold-out exhibitions included “Manhattan Glamour,” “Seeing…Blue” and “Gems.” “Having identified the expected, I think it’s now time to use the flower as a vehicle for the unexpected,” said Buck. “Flower paintings have been considered lightweight in the contemporary art world. However, once past that notion the connotation of flower begins to open and grow. Flowers symbolize fertility and fragility, a symbol of womanhood.”

“Wild Flowers” will encompass the flower as cartoon, architectural detail, pop icon, emblem of ornament, sexual metaphor, the originator of pigment (the first paints, were made from flowers) and one of the premises of aesthetic theory.

Artwork highlights include an Eighteenth Century Dutch still life of tulips and insects, Alex Katz’s lithograph “White Petunia” and Mason Rader’s “Fleur D. Bee,” oil and encaustic on wood, 1999.

Furniture and decorative arts include a pair of hand painted Louis XVI bergeres with embroidered flowered silk seats, a mid-Twentieth Century settee covered in Osbourne and Little’s “Easter Lily” gold embossed fabric, and assorted Italian and Scandinavian mid-Twentieth Century ceramics depicting floral motifs. The furniture will be upholstered in the deeply saturated color of wild flowers and selected for their curvilinear similarity and reference to petals.

The gallery is at 1326 Madison Avenue. For information, www.buckhouse.biz or 212-828-3123.