FLAG Art Foundation, New York
27 February - 21 June 2025
The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to announce A Rose Is, an expansive group exhibition that examines the ubiquity and multivalent meaning of the rose throughout art history and visual culture. Across a wide array of media, including video, sculpture, painting, and text, the exhibition considers the rose in all of its symbolic and ritual complexity, ultimately seeking to complicate our familiarity with it as a vehicle for consumption and desire.
Drawing inspiration from Cy Twombly’s monumental, four-part painting The Rose III (2008), the exhibition situates the rose—both physically and figuratively—as an icon of beauty, enticement, excess, and abjection, all at the same time. Set against a vibrant turquoise backdrop, three purple, yellow, and tangerine roses overflow and drip down the face of the first three panels of the twenty-five-foot-long canvas, with the fourth panel containing text fragments from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem The Roses (1926). Through an ecstatic combination of scale, color, and form, Twombly allows viewers to see the lushness and vitality of the roses while also contemplating their diminishment.