Suzanne Bocanegra: All of The Petals from Jan Brueghel the Elder's Bouquet

Suzanne Bocanegra’s show will feature two wall installations from her series, All of the Petals in Jan Brueghel the Elder’s Bouquets, and selected recent collages.

In her striking installations that deconstruct the floral still life paintings of Jan Brueghel the Elder (Flemish, 1568–1625), Bocanegra investigates Baroque notions of wealth and collecting. The larger installation is based on the opulent bouquet depicted in Brueghel’s Flowers in a Ceramic Vase of 1620 and measures 113 x 72 inches; the smaller one (72 x 42 inches) was inspired by Painted Flower Vase, also of 1620. For these monumental works, Bocanegra’s process begins with meticulous counting of the petals in the Dutch master’s work and is followed by a precise mapping of the composition. She proceeds by making cut paper petals painted with gouache and wax and attaches these to linen stems. Next, the artist groups her petals in clusters that correspond to the individual flowers in Brueghel’s painting. And in the final step, Bocanegra pins these clusters to the wall where they hang inverted from their linen stems like impeccably preserved dried flowers, arranging them according to their placement in Brueghel’s composition. The tactile, robust quality of her materials in both installations transmits both the aesthetic and cultural extravagance of the original paintings through a post-modern lens.

A group of intimate collages from 2002 echo place and more personal experience. For this series, Bocanegra arranged scraps of found paper, felt and other castoffs she gathered while a fellow at The American Academy in Rome to create gridded compositions based on layouts that intrigued her on the pages of an illustrated book of European folk textiles.

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