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The Rose Garden is a tribute to Jannis Kounellis, one of my heroes.

 

After seeing the exhibition in the Fondazione Prada in Venice (2019), the works of Jannis Kounellis kept haunting my mind. For months I was brooding on pink wool and roses until inspiration came. 

 

Flowers have a symbolic meaning in our social life. The rose, the queen of flowers, is generally a symbol of love, joy, happiness and affection. The occasions when we give a symbolic bouquet of roses inspired my larger works. 

 

The smaller works came about through my daily walks through my neighbourhood in The Hague during the first corona lockdown in  2020. On the pavement, against the house facades, I came across all kinds of roses. These were captured in a series of small paintings.  

 

Kounellis said in an interview: "I have been thinking about doing a whole show like this. The painting in the first room with the black rose and the cages, just to be consistently obsessive. It's like entering a forest of roses, but enlarged to gigantic proportions, and others very small." 

 

This is my forest of roses.

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