Transforming Five Tulips in a Wan Li Vase
On your next visit to the Frick, don’t miss your chance to see our most recent acquisition—Transforming Five Tulips in a Wan Li Vase by English artists and husband-and-wife team Rob and Nick Carter. The Carters have been exploring the intersection of technology and fine art for over 20 years, and since 2012 one of the groundbreaking strategies they have used to combine these interests is through works that they describe as “digital transformation paintings.”
The source painting: Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573-1621). Tulips in a Wan-Li Vase, 1619. Oil on wood. Private collection.
The Carters select the subject matter for their digital paintings from art historical sources—either directly from an existing work of art, or from tastes and styles of a particular time. In the case of Transforming Five Tulips in a Wan Li Vase, the Carters have chosen a painting by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (1573–1621) as their source. The Bosschaert painting, made early in the 1600s, combined two luxury commodities of the period—exotic tulips, with their sensual, color-saturated petals, and precious Chinese porcelain. (It wasn’t until about 100 years after the Bosschaert painting that Europeans mastered the correct formula for producing the beautiful, translucent white of fine porcelain.) The Bosschaert piece, which to viewers today may seem like an almost minimalistically simple still life, was, to viewers of the time, a study of material wealth and the fragility of beauty, and by extension an attempt to preserve the ephemeral pleasures of the flowers themselves, captured in paint and unwithering.
To create this “digital painting,” the Carters arranged five different types of tulips in a Wan-Li (1572–1620) vase and filmed them continuously over a period of ten days to capture the natural process of withering and decay. In post-production, the periods of inactivity were speeded up, and the perceptible movements, such as a tulip dropping, were kept in real time. Finally, the huge data files created over ten days were condensed into the completed 32-minute piece, which explores the same themes of beauty, materiality, and mortality as its Dutch ancestor.
Studies have shown that the average amount of time a museum visitor spends looking at a work of art is about 17 seconds. Through works like their transformation paintings, the Carters hope to change that statistic by creating works with subtle movements that encourage attentiveness.
How Long Do People Really Spend Looking at Art in Museums?
Transforming Five Tulips in a Wan-li Vase was acquired at The Frick’s most recent Collectors Dinner, and builds on our efforts to collect contemporary art that complements and activates our permanent collection. With its seductively beautiful digital “painting,” it both disrupts and illuminates the collection and pushes the Frick into exciting, new territory in terms of the collecting of time-based media. Transforming Five Tulips in a Wan-Li Vase presents an opportunity for contemporary viewers to connect with and explore the ideas behind symbol and representation in the still-life genre, as well as reflecting on the same ideas of beauty and transience that tulips remind us of every spring.
