Jean Lowe - Say it with Flowers

**Jean Lowe** crafts juicy papier-mâché sculpture, swashbuckling paintings and elaborate installations in a comically faux Baroque flamboyance. Her work combines classical art history and libraries with contemporary pop culture in a playful, witty social critique. Claes Oldenburg's early _Store_ works turned everyday objects into drippy art, but Jean Lowe transforms high art into symbols, metaphors and visual puns. **_Say it with Flowers_** draws upon the Golden Age of Dutch floral still life paintings and their inherent message that, although vibrant and glorious, life wilts and fades quickly. She borrows "promiscuously" from works by Rachel Ruysch, the most recognized female painter of the period. Lowe describes her new paintings as, "a mash up of flowers that seem less likely to quiver in the wind than to stomp furiously on their way. They attempt to balance a clumsy, sexy and painterly beauty with a meditation on the brevity of our short lives. A flower can suggest the transience of life and procreation at the same time." Lowe's florals also carry references to the Dutch tulip mania of the 1630s when prices of these temporal earthly blooms skyrocketed then collapsed, becoming the first recorded speculative economic bubble in history. The installation of _Say it with Flowers_ pointedly includes a lusciously painted rug on the floor, a nod towards their frequent inclusion in Dutch paintings, but also a sly symbol of the colloquial "rug salesman," perhaps an oblique indictment of the art market itself.