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Who could forget Azuma Makoto’s frozen floral sculptures flanking the runway of Dries Van Noten’s liberally floral inflected Spring/Summer 2017 show?
You know the ones. The towering ice blocks inside which Azuma, a Japanese floral artist, arranged almost 100 types of rare flowers into 23 different poesies; the breathtaking sculptures that travelled from an Amsterdam flower market to a traditional icehouse in the Belgian countryside to the French fashion capital in refrigerated cars to preserve the delicate interplay between flower, light, air and water; the show-stealing installation inspired by Makoto’s show, Iced Flowers, staged in Tokyo in 2015.
Not I, evidently.
Should you need a refresher, the label today published a behind-the-scenes look at Makoto’s incredible artistic process, seen above.
The Tokyo-based artist has garnered a great deal of international attention for his sculptural and installation works, in which the artist incorporates plants and living matter onto non-traditional forms like metal to further blur the lines between nature and artifice. Makoto, who also designed the wallpaper for Van Noten’s 2014 career retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, also made headlines in 2014 for Exobotanica, a series of works that involved projecting two botanical objects – a 50-year-old Japanese white pine bonsai suspended from a metal frame; and an arrangement of 30 varietals of brightly coloured flowers from around the world including orchids, hydrangeas and lilies – into the stratosphere using helium balloons.
His work, which you can view more of here, is quite literally out of this world.
Tile and cover image: Peter White/Getty Images
