The Brandhorst Museum is taking part in the city-wide Flower Power Festival with an exhibition inspired by Cy Twombly's rose paintings."La vie en rose. Brueghel, Monet, Twombly" brings together works by other artists, based on Twombly's poetically conceived subjects such as death, freedom, loneliness and eroticism, including Jennifer Packer, Ellsworth Kelly, Georgia O'Keeffe, Gabriele Münter and last but not least Claude Monet, who with his famous "water lilies" from 1915 is represented. This bouquet of works from the Bavarian State Painting Collections and external loans reveals the complex and sometimes contradictory motives of numerous artists who have been dealing with the depiction of flowers for centuries.

In 1946 Edith Piaf sang La vie en rose for the first time in front of an audience. The song tells about how love, like a loved one, makes all life appear in the color of roses. Piaf's song gave words to the overwhelming longing that after the war, after occupation, persecution and resistance, there should be happiness again, trust, closeness and devotion. But "La vie en rose" is not only optimistic and intoxicated with love, it is also permeated by a gentle melancholy, by the knowledge that all happiness ends, the inevitability of mourning, farewell and loss. The exhibition "La vie en rose" in the Brandhorst Museum explores this ambiguity of colors and feelings in painting. Flowers and blossoms were a preferred subject. They embody the overwhelming and mysterious beauty of nature,are charged with poetry and meaning and can express emotions and fantasies without describing them in words. The variety of their forms also challenges the creativity and virtuosity of the artists.

The focus of the exhibition is Cy Twombly's 2008 rose cycle. Twombly created the Untitled (Roses) series specifically for a room in the museum that opened in 2009, where it has been on display ever since.In six monumental pictures of different colors, the artist plays through some of the classic themes of flower symbolism and sets them alongside fragments of poems: the intensity of memory (blue roses), death and mourning (violet roses), eroticism (pink roses), and redemption (the red-green roses) and freedom and loneliness (the yellow roses). These six pictures and themes are accompanied by outstanding historical and contemporary loans from the Old and New Pinakothek, the Modern Art Collection in the Pinakothek der Moderne, the State Graphic Collection Munich, the Municipal Gallery in the Lenbachhaus Munich,

"La vie en rose" takes place on the occasion of the Flower Power Festival Munich 2023, which celebrates nature in the city in many exhibitions and events.

An exhibition of the Bavarian State Painting Collections

Curated by Achim Hochdörfer, Giampaolo Bianconi with Estelle Vallender

Article translated to English from a Museum Brandhorst press release.

Photo Copyright Cy Twombly,