Flower Series

Oto Gillen | New York

Arts New York Oto Flowers photos

Location: Two Manhattan West, 375 9th Avenue, New York, NY 10001

This artwork is not open to the public

About the work

This series by Oto Gillen depicts artificial flowers which the artist photographed on the streets of New York. He explains: “it occurred to me earlier this year that I had never contemplated how artificial flowers appear up close. The frayed and often sun-bleached polyester petals reveal their unit of construction; woven fibers from an industrial loom. These are low-resolution objects in comparison to their biological source material. As a subject, I feel these fake flowers are absorbent enough for the anxieties of the present moment to saturate these images. Formally, I also sought to imbue these inanimate objects with a presence or sentience of their own.”

Gillen printed these photographs directly onto custom-engineered metal sheets using a dye-sublimation process, to produce “photographs whose content possesses a texture incongruous with the smoothness of the aluminum substrate they are printed on.”

Sunflower (8th Avenue), May 11, 2023; 2023

Dye sublimation on aluminum

48 x 32 x 1 inches

Edition of 3 + 1 AP


Morning Glory (Perry Street), March 30, 2023; 2023

Dye sublimation on aluminum

48 x 32 x 1 inches

Edition of 3 + 1 AP


Peony (Hudson Street), March 30, 2023; 2023

Dye sublimation on aluminum

48 x 32 x 1 inches

Edition of 3 + 1 AP


Yellow Daisy (MacDougal Street), May 23, 2023; 2023

Dye sublimation on aluminum

48 x 32 x 1 inches

Edition of 3 + 1 AP


Daffodil (MacDougal Street), May 22, 2023; 2023 (not pictured above)

Dye sublimation on aluminum

48 x 32 x 1 inches

Edition of 3 + 1 AP


About Oto Gillen

Oto Gillen (b. 1984, New York) works across photography and sculpture, often combining the two approaches to create photographs with a noticeable materiality. His monumental 108-minute slideshow video, New York, was a critical highlight of the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art and is included the museum’s permanent collection.