Madonnas of the Flowers

Description

"The artist sits in front of the camera with her face wrapped in gauze. Behind her head, the light sparkles in a halo made of Plexiglas. She holds a transparent fan in her hand. To the sounds of a kitschy South Sea melody, the light-filled, veiled face shines like the insubstantial face, like a beautiful apparition. In the first part of the video, the same process is done by her little daughter.
The work ironizes the desired image of the beautiful female body, celebrated like a devotional image - as we repeatedly encounter it in the past and present, in art and advertising."
(Source: Gerhard Glüher (ed.), Ulrike Rosenbach : Wege zur Medienkunst 1969 bis 2004, Köln, Wienand, 2005, p.219.)

"The dissolution of an ideal is topic of this early black and white video piece. Stimulated by the experience of the flower parade taking place annually at New Year’s Day in Pasadena (California), where hundreds of women dressed up as „Flower Queens“ pass on opulent carts through the streets, Ulrike Rosenbach created this ironic piece. Accompanied by the syrupy rhythms of Hawaiian music the artist and her daughter celebrate a curious ritual with the insignias of the “Flower Queen”: crown of rays and fan.
“Madonnas of the Flowers is the reckoning up with an instilled ‘value’ that treats the vanishing of youth and beauty as equal to loss of identity” Rosenbach writes in an early text. The piece wants to make the viewer aware of the cliché of the ‘slave of the beautiful pose, the queen lifted onto the altar, without blemish and without character’. "
(Source, artist's website)

Publications and Periodicals which reference the work

Gerhard Glüher (ed.), Ulrike Rosenbach : Wege zur Medienkunst 1969 bis 2004, Köln, Wienand, 2005.

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