Florals are shaping up to be very big for spring. This is especially—and perhaps always—true in London, where, mid-May, the sun has been plentiful, just in time for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.
On Tuesday night, flowers and those who love them abounded at Shreeji, the Air Mail newsstand on Chiltern Street, to celebrate the opening of “Somewhere in the Nowhere,” an exhibition in collaboration with Freddie’s Flowers, featuring abstracted botanical collages by the artist Pip Carter.
The artist David Downton, Anderson & Sheppard’s Anda Rowland, André Balazs, the owner of the celebrated (but recently charred) Chiltern Firehouse across the street, Métier’s Melissa Morris, the authors James Fox, Henry Porter, and Peter Howarth, the editors Joseph Bullmore and Tom Chamberlin, Air Mail’s Graydon Carter (the artist’s father-in-law), and the photographers Jonathan Becker and Dafydd Jones were among the well-wishers who congratulated Carter on her first solo exhibition. It marks a new public chapter in her work, which initially focused on private commissions for musicians, fashion houses, restaurants, and film studios.
Carter’s floral theme is a recurring one, influenced in part by the long stretches she spent on an island off the coast of Maine, and the artworks are peppered with references to Henri Matisse, Agnes Martin, and Emma Kunz.
Carter’s works were accompanied by arrangements of poppies and irises suspended above, and by glasses of Racquet Rosé poured below. The experience felt dreamlike, but given all the photos being taken in this Edenic realm, this is one reverie unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon.
