Ofrenda.Cloris
Berlin, 2025
Dried flowers. From the work Stillleben, 2025.Project: Arcadia! - IDILIAKÓS. Kewenig Galerie Berlin
On the ceiling of the Galerie Kewenig in Berlin, a Baroque painting depicts a floral crown held by two putti—nude children characteristic of Central European Baroque decorative language. This motif, situated within the historical context of the Palais Happe o Galgenhaus (1688), refers to an iconographic tradition in which the vegetal garland or crown functions as a symbol of triumph, honor, and idealized prestige.
In Greek mythology, Cloris—known as Flora in the Roman tradition—is the goddess of gardens, a terrestrial nymph associated with the care and regeneration of plants. Her conceptual presence runs through the work as a figure that connects the ornamental with the vital, the cyclical, and the perishable.
The flowers used in this installation come from the remains of Stillleben (2018), which have been left to dry in the studio since then. Their materiality, marked by time, introduces a temporal dimension that contrasts with Baroque idealization. Chromatically, the muted tones of the dried flowers relate to the colors of the painted crown on the ceiling, establishing a visual continuity that links past and present.
In the Baroque period—and already since the Renaissance—the vegetal crown, or garland, symbolizes perfection, eternity, and glory. In contrast, the dried flowers introduce fragility, the passage of time, and the death of the organic. A shift thus takes place: from the ideal image to matter in the process of disappearance.
The act of fixing the flowers to the wall transforms their function. If, in the Baroque context, flowers decorate and glorify, here they become an offering. Pinned in place, marked by a violent and irreversible gesture, they take on a votive quality, close to the ritual and the funerary. Ornament becomes trace.
Cloris Offering works as a contemporary pseudo-ritual in which nature appears simultaneously as an object of veneration and of loss.
The crown thus ceases to be a celebration and instead becomes a remnant, a relic, a material memory of accumulated time. In this transition, the figure of Cloris no longer embodies only fertility and blossoming, but also its inevitable reverse: withering, persistence, and transformation.
Cloris Offering works as a contemporary pseudo-ritual in which nature appears simultaneously as an object of veneration and of loss.
The crown thus ceases to be a celebration and instead becomes a remnant, a relic, a material memory of accumulated time. In this transition, the figure of Cloris no longer embodies only fertility and blossoming, but also its inevitable reverse: withering, persistence, and transformation.
