A Rose a Day No. 40

This is a work by the contemporary Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (b.1958), entitled A Flor de Piel (2014).

The artist and her team stitched together hundreds of deep red rose petals, each of which has been chemically treated to preserve their dark hue and pliant texture within a huge canopy which is intended to lie creased and pleated on the floor. 

A flor de piel is a Spanish idiomatic expression meaning ‘on the surface of the skin’, used to describe extreme emotions that are beyond words, and the work was inspired by a Colombian nurse who, after providing care to injured parties on both sides of Colombia’s protracted civil, was kidnapped and tortured to death. Salcedo has found a powerful analogy for the eruption onto the skin’s surface, but of the transfiguring of the suffering through the ethereal beauty of the rose petal cloak.

By linking the blood red rose petals to the human skin and to a contemporary context of political anarchy and systemic violence, Salcedo has also succeeded in instilling new and unsettling life into the age-old comparison that likens a woman’s skin to a rose petal. 

Image Source: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/31379