Lupine sculpture & Wildflower Fields painting at the Floralies Ghent

Arne Quinze at the Floralies Ghent 2022

Overview

No less than 3 roads lead Arne Quinze to Floralies in 2022. A beautiful sculpture on the Kouter (from 22 April '22), a Wild Flower Fields painting in the ICC (from 28 April '22) and a lecture on 1 May at 2 p.m. in the banquet room of the ICC.

1. Lupine Flower by Arne Quinze at the Kouter

Visitors to the Floralies Ghent will discover along the path Quinze’s Lupine Sculpture at the Kouter, an artwork that will invite them to reflect on the wonderful mechanisms of nature and its transience. Here, Arne Quinze’s work seems to have gushed out of the earth in a powerful message from an artist commanding attention for the beauty of nature. This piece symbolizes the first leap by which unbridled nature reclaims the city.

Deeply inspired by Impressionists such as Claude Monet, Édouard Manet & Camille Pissarro, Arne Quinze steps at a young age in the open air to explore both the rural and the urban. It strikes him that the city has lost its connection with nature and has become very mineral, almost soulless. He opposes this finding and begins in the mid-1980s with the creation of colorful murals as an impetus to restore the city's lost diversity. These actions make him realize that he can incite people into a dialogue about the current state of their public spaces. Initiating his artistic goal to embrace the grandeur of the botanical realm as a guide to reinstalling organic landscapes in urban society.

The ecosystem that Arne Quinze set up around his home a few years ago has become his laboratory for his paintings and sculptures. The experimental space is characterized by a huge variety of plant species and a wide range of colours. The artist and gardener effortlessly disappears and escapes in this secret garden. There, he finds shelter from the roaring cacophony of everyday traffic and today’s grey and monotonous urban existence. By creating and growing this quintessentially balanced and natural, Quinze expresses his aversion for greyness and monoculture as he strives to inject fragments of his radiant laboratory into our cities, where his sculptures will hopefully serve as catalysts for a vivid diversity.

Arne Quinze’s afflatus is not only reduced to the sporadic spurts and bursts of the explosion of nature’s fresh greenery in spring. The awareness that plants wither as winter approaches before eventually – partially – dying, constantly hovers over the garden. The decaying phase provides a sense of slight nostalgia for days gone by (or is it an optimistic prospect of the future?) for days when exploding colours still reigned over the garden. Life and decay – the two sides of the coin of nature – act as an ongoing inspiration for the work of Quinze who recently created pieces focussed on transient matter as a breeding ground for new life. In Japanese, the acceptance of this transience is known as "Mono No Aware" and is crucial in Arne Quinze's recent research on nature. Although this artwork might seem like a melancholic snapshot at first sight, it is everything but. With this sculpture, Arne Quinze celebrates life and nature by embracing the beauty and strength in the decay.

"Since 1971, we humans have managed to destroy 30% of the fauna and flora. I see it as my duty as an artist to bring nature and its diversity back to our cities." - Arne Quinze

2. Rosa Gallica, a painting from the "Wild flower" series - at ICC Ghent

Rosa Gallica, a Wildflower Fields painting, 250 x 520 cm, oil on canvas.

The duality of nature is something Arne Quinze wants to capture on his canvases. The fragility in the force and the strength of the fragility in nature is what inspires him and forms a constant flux in his work.

For Arne Quinze, the "Wildflower Series" groups together a number of paintings, the result of an exceptional confrontation with himself. Each work is a tabula rasa in which the artist can express his inner feelings and overwhelming colours. It is confronting and challenging for Arne Quinze to portray this dynamic feeling of his garden. Arne Quinze does not depict a flower but the strength and vulnerability of his entire garden. Each painting is a pure feeling that the garden gives him, a living moment that he wants to capture.

Before Arne Quinze begins to paint, he takes a long, intriguing and unpredictable journey through his self-created garden, and with that gut feeling he begins to paint. The artist tries to capture on his canvas the leafy journey and the wonder he experiences in his transforming garden. The inventive, rebellious and changing garden is his laboratory, all four seasons of the year. Not only the colour and splendour of nature is unique to the artist, but also the beauty in the decay of nature, of its wild flowers. The absolute balance between the brutality and the elegance of nature triggers Arne Quinze. This balance can also be seen on his canvas; the oil paint is applied lightly as opposed to thick strokes.

3. Lecture Rewilding with Arne Quinze - lecture on 1 May '22 at 2 p.m. (banquet room)

Arne Quinze, Belgian artist, about his international path and wildflower garden as a source of inspiration. 1 May - 2 p.m. - Banketzaal on the 1st floor ICC For Arne Quinze, nature has been an inexhaustible source of inspiration since childhood. Even though the artist has travelled the world, his own garden with 50,000 flowers is for him a wonderful and special place that gives him a tangible sense of beauty and peace. The pure feeling that his wild flower garden gives him is a living moment that he wants to capture and express through his works of art.

Floralies Ghent 2022: practical from 29 April to 8 May, the Royal Society for Agriculture and Botany will organise an international flower and plant exhibition for the 36th time in the Floralies' Palace in the Citadel Park. The exhibition will thus kick off the 2022 edition. Floralies of Ghent will continue to be part of Ghent's DNA as a flower city. In 2022 Floralies will be 'at home' in the Floralies' Hall, the Botanical Garden (next to the GUM) and the ICC (Citadel Park).