Bloom Up! The Language of Flowers

With 'Bloom up! The Language of Flowers', the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and the Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe invite visitors to a unique floral experience. The exhibition takes you on a sensuous and intellectually stimulating journey through 2,500 years of the cultural history of flowers. 

Flowers are a constant presence in our lives – in everyday moments as well as on special occasions. They shape rituals, mark transitions and hold memories. In art, they become symbols of resistance, love, hope and protest. In times of crisis, they can offer comfort and give voice to a longing for beauty. Delicate and powerful, personal and political, conciliatory and defiant – their meaning is constantly shifting, depending on time, place and context.

'Bloom up!' is the first joint exhibition by the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and the Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe. It explores flowers in art as a means of communication and highlights the use of floral motifs from antiquity to the present day. Dialogues between contemporary artistic positions and objects from art and cultural history demonstrate how floral motifs have carried, shifted or recharged their meaning over the centuries. Here, flowers appear as bearers of history, emotions, and social and political debates – and open up space for projection, memory and reflection.