Van Gogh's garden - our way!
“Always continue walking a lot and loving nature, for that’s the real way to learn to understand art better… Painters understand nature and love it, and teach us to see.” – Vincent Van Gogh
Van Gogh’s connection with the natural world is something we’ve long admired – it’s rich, emotional, and deeply embedded in his work. From childhood walks in the Dutch countryside to the blazing sunflowers and writhing irises of his later years, nature was his anchor and his muse. His landscapes and flower paintings don’t just capture the world as it looks, but as it feels – charged with colour, movement, and emotion.
So being invited to create site-specific installations for the New York Botanical Garden’s grand floral celebration of Van Gogh was both an honour and a huge creative challenge. The scale, history, and beauty of the NYBG site — particularly the stunning glasshouse and reflecting pool — called for something immersive, bold, and emotionally resonant.
Photo by Da Ping Luo
We created two new works for this exhibition:
Irises on Yellow Columns, housed in the breathtaking conservatory, draws inspiration from Irises (1889), one of Van Gogh’s most iconic flower paintings. There’s something sculptural in the way he painted them – twisting forms outlined in bold, broken lines that pulse with life. For this piece, we reinterpreted those irises in our own visual language, scaling them up and translating his signature brushwork into large, three-dimensional forms.
Photo by NYBG
Typically, our artwork relies on flat colour and bold outlines to suggest depth. But here, we experimented with directional lines and opposing primary colours to exaggerate the play between foreground and background — creating a sense of abstract form that felt true to Van Gogh’s spirit. The tallest of our illuminated columns reaches nearly 23 feet high, subtly echoing the New York skyline, and helping the irises blend seamlessly with the towering palms inside the glasshouse. Reflections in the surrounding water and vivid floor imagery complete the scene, wrapping visitors in colour and movement from every angle.
Outside, in the reflecting pool, you’ll find All His Flowers in the Round — a huge, immersive installation that celebrates the breadth of Van Gogh’s botanical paintings. Though he’s best known for his sunflowers, he painted hundreds of flowers across his career, always in tune with the seasons: fluffy peonies in spring, spears of gladioli in summer, colourful chrysanthemums in the autumn.
Photo by Da Ping Luo
To create this piece, we dug deep into his archive, gathering the many varieties he captured and composing them into a circular artwork designed to respond to the vast, open setting of NYBG’s gardens. The colours, shapes, and mirrored water reflections are intended to draw viewers in and invite gentle contemplation — a quiet homage to both the beauty of flowers and Van Gogh’s reverence for them.
This project has been a journey of exploration — not just into Van Gogh’s work, but into his process. Over the past year, we’ve researched his letters, his thoughts on colour and form, and the emotional undercurrents that ran through his paintings. We’ve worked hard to blend our Graphic Rewilding visual style with Van Gogh’s, staying sympathetic to his imagery while still being true to ourselves.
From early drawings and flower studies to 3D modelling and full-scale prototyping, our goal has always been to make work that connects — not just visually, but emotionally. As visitors move around each sculpture, the colour palette and forms shift subtly, creating a sense of journey and discovery — much like walking through one of Van Gogh’s painted gardens.
