My Secret Garden: Arne Quinze

The development of this series of My Secret Garden paintings was preceded by a great quest. Arne Quinze started this project around 6 years ago by planting a flower meadow of more than 4000 plants and flowers around his house, achieving a complete metamorphosis in order to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of nature. How do plants grow, develop and behave? How do they evolve through the seasons? What is the symbiotic relationship between different plants? And above all, how do they influence us? Quinze worked, arranged and researched his own garden in an almost romantic way, following in the footsteps of the great Impressionist Monet in order to arrive at a moment of knowledge and insight, thus allowing him to paint freely and without constraints.

 

My Secret Garden is an exuberant and explosive series, full of dynamics, colour, diversity and composition spread over several canvases. Enormous canvases of expressive and explosive colour, and smaller canvases hinting at a poetic and almost feminine romanticism. With his My Secret Garden series, Quinze lays himself bare to the viewer. He demonstrates the search, the commitment and the fight that led him to the perfect Secret Garden. My Secret Garden is a very personal series, and perhaps for that very reason, most can identify with it. The ultimate challenge is to engage viewers to look into their own inner selves and discover their own Secret Garden.

 

Quinze's work has been exhibited internationally, including museums such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the MARTa Herford Museum (Frank Gehry galleries) in Herford, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humblebæk, the Musée des Beaux Arts in Rouen, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam and the Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain in Nice. Additionally, Quinze has made installations for Human Rights Watch, The Flemish Parliament in Brussels, the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, Tomorrowland, Festival des Impressionistes in Rouen, The National History Museum in Shanghai and Georgetown in Washington D.C., amongst others.