Willem de Rooij, Bouquet IX, 2012, white ceramic vase, plinth, spheric flower arrangement measuring 100 cm, 10 different sorts of white flowers, approx. 240 x 100 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
The exhibition City Prince/sses is presented as an imaginary, multiple and complex city, without borders, messy, staggering and creative: an unpredictable laboratory, which is always in motion and being (re)constructed. Visual artists, creators, fashion designers, experimenters, tattooists, musicians: a good fifty artists are presented without any geographical grouping, mostly via new productions and in situ interventions.
De Rooij began developping the Bouquet series in 2002 together with Jeroen de Rijke and continued alone after the latter's untimely death in 2006.
The 16 different existing bouquets to date are based on an image, a story, a one-liner, or a short description – this source material is given to a florist to interpret. The resulting floral interpretation is described in a text, and this text, together with a list of the flowers, forms the basis of the work thanks to which the floral sculpture can be reconstructed at any given time in the future. Some Bouquets have a clear social or political connotation, others a merely formal one. What they all have in common, is their capacity to be physically absent, like a film: if you don’t reconstruct the work, it exists in the mind only.
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