“People have always painted flowers. Since Antiquity, a host of artists have brought all the meticulous precision of the miniaturist to their depictions of stems, pistils and petals in clusters or corollas. Over the centuries, the flower has established itself as
an inescapable motif, a classic subject. Why, one might ask. Is it because a flower means more than just what it is, gives more pause for thought than the countryside in which it grows? Such success is no doubt linked to the high degree of symbolic meaning that has become attached to the flower over the course of time.”
(Marianne Mathieu)

For his 6th solo show at the gallery, Keith Tyson decided to work on that classical “style” and presents a series of twenty unseen paintings, achievement of five years of gestation.

“I began thinking whether I might be able to make some paintings with a similar attitude to that of the flower arranger, combining varied styles and techniques of painting in a single work just for the visual pleasure and poetry of it. Each brushstroke being like a petal, each style of painting like a flower. (…) I also wanted the paintings to have a wide range of style and texture.

I remember after a long walk in the Sussex countryside one day I decided to tackle some
larger panels. (…) On the walk I had realised that Nature despite being made from essentially the same stuff has all these different textures because of differing techniques and orderings it utilises; spiky grass, branching trees, undulating hills and billowing clouds are the way they are because of different causal systems that drive them. I wanted to get that sense of a complex of differing textures into these works. Of being lost in the complexity of the Whole.” (Keith Tyson)

Keith Tyson was born in 1969 in Ulverston, Cumbria (UK). He completed a degree in at Brighton University in 1993. Three years later, he received the ICA Arts & Innovation Award, and in 2002 won the prestigious Turner Prize.
His work has been exhibited at the Centre Georges-Pompidou, Whitney Museum, Royal Academy, Tate Modern, the ICA and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and is held in collections around the world including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen), Arts Council (London), MoMA (New York), Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris) and Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art. He lives and works in Sussex and is represented by Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois since 1997.

A book will be published on the occasion of the show Les Fleurs, which includes the texts above.