Still Life with Flowers (from Pink to Red)

The artist extracted colours from the different flowers of a bouquet (chinese delphiniums, alpine delphiniums, eucalyptus, safflowers, and roses), leaving the plants pale and colourless. The distilled colour pigments were then conserved in transparent isomalt and displayed in laboratory glass vessels alongside the now-white bouquet.

In traditional still-life paintings, the painted colours of blossoms captured a moment in time and 'defeated' death. In Still Life with Flowers, Salonen reinterprets this tradition by poetically separating the life energy (the preserved colour) from its empty, pale body (the decoloured flower).