£900.00
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Less a photograph and more a hallucination—an acid-drenched vision of cherry blossoms melting into pure light. His florals don’t sit politely in vases; they pulsate, bleed color, and flicker between beauty and something more ominous, more unhinged. The blossoms seem radioactive, their petals dissolving into a dreamstate where nature glitches, loops, and mutates.
Neal Brown, in The Meaning Of Flowers, dissects how blooms are never just blooms—always standing in for something else, whether sex, decay, or ritual. Cherry blossoms, in particular, are overloaded with symbolism: in Japanese mono no aware, they are exquisite and doomed, petals dropping like tiny death scenes; in Western kitsch, they’re aestheticized into wallpaper, perfume, and café lattes. McConnell distorts these histories, warping the soft delicacy of blossoms into something chemically heightened, where the line between reverie and reality frays.
His Dream Blossom works feels less like a tribute to nature’s fleeting beauty and more like a fever dream of its digital afterlife—a flower photographed, filtered, re-processed, and reborn in hyper-color, its fragile symbolism stretched to the edge of collapse.
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McConnell’s Frieze Week flowers – ecstasies of trippy-beauty – effervescence and fluorescence. Post-contagion-hedonism-colours. McConnell’s Frieze posters/down in the dark, in the tube – sugar-high intoxication colours, growing out of the fertile, warm dark dust of London’s tube platforms. McConnell’s specialist horticultural knowledge makes his flowers retinally absolute – pure, Class A, medicinal grade. Flash. Flash. Flash. Separation and disjunction. The retina’s relationship of service to the brain becomes a little less servile – render unto brain seizure that which is brain seizure’s . . .
Neal Brown, The Meaning of Flowers