Gabriele Grones

IRL Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Gabriele Grones, featuring more than fifty new paintings developed following the artist's 2026 Winter Workspace residency at Wave Hill in the Bronx.

The exhibition takes as its point of departure three plants observed during the residency—crocus, snowdrop, and hellebore. From these modest subjects, Grones constructs an expansive network of images that moves between direct observation, botanical illustration, mythology, art history, decorative arts, and scientific inquiry. The resulting body of work examines how plants become vessels of cultural memory, carrying meanings that evolve across centuries and civilizations.

Structured as a series of visual constellations, the exhibition unfolds through three interconnected groups dedicated to each flower. Small-scale botanical studies record the species and cultivars observed at Wave Hill with close attention to their individual characteristics. Larger paintings situate the plants within their natural environment, while a broader selection of works traces their appearances throughout history—from ancient mythology and Renaissance manuscripts to nineteenth-century decorative arts and early experiments in photography.

Rather than presenting a linear narrative, Grones organizes the exhibition as a field of associations. Images from different periods and contexts are brought into dialogue, inviting viewers to move freely between observation and interpretation, science and imagination. The installation recalls the open-ended structure of Aby Warburg's Bilderatlas Mnemosyne and André Malraux's Musée Imaginaire, where meaning emerges through proximity, comparison, and visual correspondence rather than chronology.

Throughout the exhibition, painting operates simultaneously as a tool of research and a mode of attention. Botanical specimens, historical artifacts, archaeological objects, manuscripts, and works of art are translated into a unified pictorial language, revealing unexpected continuities between systems of knowledge that are often considered separate. Scientific taxonomy coexists with folklore, religious symbolism with empirical observation, allowing each image to function as both document and interpretation.

At a moment when relationships between culture and the natural world are increasingly being reconsidered, Grones proposes the flower not simply as a botanical subject but as a site where histories of observation, belief, representation, and memory converge. Through more than fifty paintings, the exhibition offers a meditation on how knowledge is collected, transmitted, and transformed through images.